Microbe Magazine

With synthetic biology, “don't believe the hype; we're taking baby steps and it's hard to get things to work the way you want,” says James Collins of Boston University in Boston, Mass. “We're still like the Wright brothers, putting wood and paper together,” adds Herbert Sauro ... More...

Commensal gut bacteria apparently influence human health more than they are credited with, according to Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College, London, England, who spoke during the symposium, “The Human Body as Supra-Organism, Microbial Observatory, and Ecosystem at Risk,” part of the annual meeti... More...

Organisms belonging to a 34,000-year-old microbial ecosystem within brine-filled inclusions from subsurface halite crystals dating to the Pleistocene Epoch thrive once extracted, according to geomicrobiologists Tim K. Lowenstein, Brain A. Schubert, and Michael N. Timofeeff from the State Universi... More...

Some strains of the foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, known for causing gastroenteritis, also can infect the heart, sometimes fatally. Moreover, heart-targeting strains apparently favor muscle tissue instead of valves, setting them apart from other bacteria... More...

Analysis of metagenomic data suggests a fourth domain of life, according to Jonathan Eisen of the University of California Davis (UCD). Based on biological samples collected from 2003 to 2007 during the Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition that was led by Craig Venter, Eisen and his colleagues ... More...

Burkholderia cenocepacia J2315 both makes and requires a pair of RNA chaperone proteins to be fully virulent and to resist stress, according to Jorge H. Leitao of the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal, and his colleagues. Their finding, ... More...