Microbe Magazine

A new form of light microscopy, called photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), greatly boosts resolution over more conventional approaches and promises to improve and become more versatile, according to Harald Hess and Eric Betzig, who recently moved to the Virginia-based Janelia Farm Rese... More...

Despite expanding plans for dealing with the public health crisis that the anticipated influenza pandemic will surely provoke, experts who focus on infectious diseases anticipate dealing with many difficult—and some, perhaps intractable—ethical and legal challenges as the epidemic takes hold. Alt... More...

A bacteriocin used by one bacterial species to kill others requires mannose permease, an inner membrane protein complex involved in uptake of that sugar to kill target organisms, according to Dominique Belin of the University of Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland, his graduate student Sylvain Biéler, ... More...

About 200 miles from Yellowstone National Park, is a site not as scenic, yet proving nearly as exotic in terms of its rich diversity of extremophiles. Instead of geysers and hot springs, the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Mont., contains 30 billion gallons of highly acidic waters (pH 2.5) from abandoned ... More...

The Lasker Foundation this year honored with its award for basic medical research Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Jack W. Szostak of Harvard Medic... More...

The genome for the extremophile Pedomicrobium manganicum recently was added to the docket for the Joint Genome Institute and Community Sequencing Program of the Department of Energy (DOE). The ability of this microbe to produce manganese oxides and its potential for remediating radioactive... More...

By mid-October, officials of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and spinach producers were still puzzling over a widespread outbreak of illnesses attributable to fresh spinach that was contaminated with Escherichia coli O157:H7. Besides the three deaths among about 200 cases of illness... More...