Microbe Magazine

While the limelight shines on the bacterial microbiome for its role in shaping human health and disease, the virome remains more in the shadows. However, viruses associated with human hosts can have profound impacts on their health, according to several researchers who spoke during the ASM 2016 M... More...

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) apparently was a thermophilic, anaerobic, nitrogen-fixing microorganism, according to William F. Martin from the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf, Germany, and his collaborators. Their findings suppor... More...

Recent developments involving microbiology and related science policy matters and including drug, vaccine, and diagnostic product approvals:

• During the United Nations General Assembly last September, world leaders vowed to take a coordinated app...

Microbiologists recently realized that lichens, formerly defined as pairings of fungi and algae (cyanobacteria), instead include a third component—yeast. Indeed, yeast cells are found embedded in the cortexes of lichens collected on six continents—thus overturning a definition for lichens that wa... More...

The development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria depends on a dynamic growth process, involving a program that is far more complex than mere emergence of mutants with higher resistance than their predecessor strains, according to Roy Kishony of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology i... More...

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, about $936,000 this year, recognizes Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his efforts to understand autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components, research that he began by studying yeast. Separately, among the 201... More...