Microbe Magazine

The impact of gut microbiota on human health begins at birth, and may be influenced by factors such as mode of delivery and early infant diet, according to several researchers who presented recent findings during the 2015 ASM General Meeting held in New Orleans last May. These early influences on... More...

Although natural products remain “the best source of antibiotics,” finding ways to accelerate their discovery remains a critical challenge for would-be developers of new drugs, says Ben Shen from the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla. The recipient this year of the Promega Biotechnology ... More...

Small, noncoding RNA molecules (sRNA) appear to play a key role in regulating the onset of periodontitis, turning on virulence genes and defenses against the host immune system, according to Jorge Frias-Lopez of the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and his collaborators. This research is th... More...

Bacteria living within fungi influence host metabolism, reproductive activity, and ecosystem effects, according to several researchers who spoke during the symposium, “Microbes in Microbes (Russian Dolls),” at the 2015 ASM General Meeting, held in New Orleans last May. Thus, for example, some end... More...

Fungal eisosomes are shallow, trough-shaped invaginations of the plasma membrane, of unknown function, that are ubiquitous in fungi. Fungal eisosome assembly requires two conserved proteins carrying “BAR” domains, triple-coiled-coil motifs associated with generation of membrane curvature. Now Urs... More...

In the first such prospective study, Stanley Spinola and Julia van Rensburg of Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis show that individuals with a particular skin microbiome can effectively clear bacteria that cause chancroid, a sexually transmitted disease common in developing count... More...

When researchers evaluate the severity of inflammatory disease in experimental mice, they typically must euthanize the mice and then subject tissues to a variety of analytical techniques. For all this, they gain a snapshot of the phenotype, but with no information on the time course of the diseas... More...

Bacterial chromosomes change organization and structure during the cell cycle, for reasons as yet unclear. Now David Magnan and David Bates of Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, show in Escherichia coli that programmed changes in chromosome structure may regulate ... More...

Periodontitis is a risk factor for heart disease. Now doctoral student Boxi Zhang and Torbjörn Bengtsson of the School of Health Sciences, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden, showed how this happens. Gingipains, virulence factors produced by Porphyromonas gingivalis,... More...

Swedish exchange students who studied in India and in central Africa returned from their sojourns with increased diversity of antibiotic resistance genes in their gut microbiomes. Anders Johansson of Umeå University, Sweden, et al. found a 2.6-fold increase in genes encoding resistance to sulfona... More...