Microbe Magazine

Transposons are largely responsible for the Dr.-Jekyll to-Mr.-Hyde switching that enables the enterococci to range from innocuous gut inhabitants to virulent, antibiotic-resistant pathogens—and then back again, according to several researchers who spoke during the 2015 ICAAC meeting held in San D... More...

A Streptococcus pyogenes clade that emerged in Portugal during the past decade quickly outcompeted several other locally circulating lineages of this pathogen, according to Mario Ramirez and his collaborators at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. What happened in... More...

Second messenger cyclic-di-GMP controls many cellular behaviors in gram-negative bacteria, but it remains a mystery how the cell's signaling networks, consisting of dozens of proteins that can make, break, or bind the molecule, correctly directs signaling output. Recent work from Dartmouth C... More...

Foodborne outbreaks remain a major concern worldwide, and the number of Listeria monocytogenes outbreaks reported increased in the European Union in 2015. New research from the University of Melbourne in Australia suggests that whole-genome sequencing (WGS) may impr... More...

Determining an effective drug dose for an infection means taking many factors into account, including nutrient levels, antimicrobial peptide production, and vascularization. Albumin concentration can now be added to factors that change the efficacy of caspofungin against A... More...

As we continue to wage the war against drug-resistant infections, research is moving forward on alternative therapies to fight resistant microbes. Histatin-5 (Hst5) is an antimicrobial peptide with known antifungal properties, including against Candida albicans. Res... More...

Most probiotic treatments consist of ingesting bacteria known to have commensal relationships with their human hosts but that have undergone little manipulation themselves. Lab head Todd Klaenhammer has a different idea. With first author Evelyn Durmaz, he and his team at North Carolina State Uni... More...

Antiviral compounds generally act at a more virus-specific level than antibacterial compounds. Work from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles, Calif., is hoping to improve this situation. First author Jun Zuo, working in Paul Krogstad's lab, conducted a high-throughput ... More...

Understanding how probiotic treatments work will help scientists better design patient therapies that involve probiotics. James Versalovic and his lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Tex., hope to do just that. The scientific team tested the hypothesis that Lacto... More...