Microbe Magazine

Several childhood diseases that supposedly disappeared are resurgent, while others show signs of yielding at long last to analysis and novel interventions, according to several investigators who presented their findings during the 2013 Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemother... More...

Telltale metabolites may unveil pathogens that otherwise would be difficult to diagnose when they are causing infections, according to several researchers who presented findings at the 2013 Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), held in Denver last September. Me... More...

PAAR (proline-alanine-alanine-arginine) repeat proteins sharpen the ends of phage-like bacterial spikes known as type VI secretion systems (T6SS) —serving as “needles” for these complex organelles through which gram-negative bacteria inject toxins into host cells during infection, according to Pe... More...

Genomic analysis of the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveals that a substantial portion of its genes are more similar to bacterial and bacteriophage than to eukaryotic genes, according to Irena I. Artamonova of the N.I. Vavilov Institute of General Gen... More...

Through phosphatidylserine residues on their outer lipid membranes, several enveloped viruses bind specifically to Tyro3/Axl/Mer (TAM) kinase receptors on cells of the immune system, turning off type I interferon signaling and making the host more susceptible to these viruses, according to Greg L... More...

Bacteriophages outnumber bacterial cells in deep and ancient oligotrophic subsurface ocean sediments, according to paleomicrobiologist Bert Engelen of the University Oldenburg in Germany and his collaborators. These numbers suggest that phages are a major controlling factor for cell abundance, di... More...

Rapid, accurate strain identification is critical to timely diagnosis and treatment during outbreaks of microbial diseases. Clustered regular interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) are one of several recently developed approaches to subtyping. Now, in a review, Nikki Shariat and Edward G... More...

For decades, now, copious antibiotics have been added to livestock feed to promote growth, which they probably do by reducing infectious disease among the animals that are often kept in severely crowded conditions. New research by Carmen Bednorz of the Freie Universitat Berlin and collaborators, ... More...

Treating periodontitis involves literally scraping dental plaque off of the root of the tooth. Despite this unpleasant and costly ordeal, the biofilm frequently grows back. Now Eric Reynolds and colleagues of the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia show in an animal model of periodontiti... More...

Time is of the essence when patients present with symptoms of suspected sepsis. Doctors immediately prescribe a cocktail of broad spectrum drugs to help clear the infection, based on clinical symptoms, patient demographics, and clinical guidelines or antimicrobial stewardship programs. But despit... More...