Microbe Magazine

Officials of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in March said that they would follow their standard procedures for determining antibiotic susceptibilities in clinical laboratories, sticking with values that appear on product labels. In doing so, agency officials more or less rejected a mid-20... More...

Officials of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) plan to stop supporting a Rhizobium germplasm collection that is maintained at the Agricultural Research Service facility in Beltsville, Md., this coming October. Bert Eardly of Pennsylvania State University in State College calls it “... More...

The skin—the body's largest organ— teems with an unexpectedly broad variety of bacterial species, according to Martin Blaser of New York University (NYU) School of Medicine in New York, N.Y., and his collaborators. “There has been a lot of work on the gastrointestinal tract … but, in contras... More...

Here are several recent noteworthy developments involving disparate vaccines, including:

Officials in charge of peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are introducing reforms to re-engineer a system that took shape more than 50 years ago, hoping to streamline the performance of the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), according to its director Toni Scarpa. However,... More...

The three most common forms of acute viral hepatitis in the United States—hepatitis A, B, and C—declined dramatically between 1995 and 2005, according to public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. For example, new cases of acute hepatitis A dec... More...

The search for practical alternative fuels is intensifying, and many experts consider hydrogen a top prospect, particularly if it could be produced cheaply. One promising, research-scale approach harnesses the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris, according to Caroline S. Ha... More...

The oceans support an unexpectedly diverse array of microorganisms containing millions of previously unidentified genes and thousands of protein families, particularly protein kinases, according to Craig Venter, who directs the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Md., and his collabora... More...

The pathogen responsible for ravaging potato crops in Ireland during the 19th century likely came from the Andes, not Mexico, according to plant pathologist Jean Beagle Ristaino and her colleagues at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. They deduced those origins by tracing changes in geno... More...

Vitamin D, which is needed to build bones, also helps the innate immune system to withstand infections in wounded skin, according to Richard L. Gallo, chief of dermatology at the University of California, San Diego, and his collaborators. They uncovered this previously unrecognized role for the v... More...