Microbe Magazine

Some biologists tracking biodiversity closely watch tropical rain forests, worrying that human encroachment, which shrinks these lush habitats, could lead to massive species losses, as could global warming. Other biologists, noting that the human population is no longer growing so fast, argue tha... More...

Recent developments involving clinical and preclinical studies of malaria include:

• The efficacy rate for RTS, S/AS01E, an experimental vaccine to protect against malaria, was 53% when tested among children in Kenya and Tanzania, according to Philip...

A fatty acid recovered from Pseudomonas aeruginosa potently prevents growth of and can disperse biofilms of this or other gram-negative or gram-positive bacteria as well as some fungi, according to David G. Davies of the State University of New York, Binghamton, and his collaborators. That... More...

Gradually developed epigenetic changes to the genomes of several distinct types of virus that infect humans appear to lead to development of cancers among those who are infected long term with those viruses, according to Manel Esteller of the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research in Barcelo... More...

Scientists continue to investigate factors that could account for the high lethality of the Spanish influenza virus, which killed at least 20 million people during the 1918 pandemic. Recent findings point to a set of RNA polymerase genes plus a nucleoprotein that apparently enabled the 1918 virus... More...

Some U.S. scientists are so concerned that microbiology and other research in the life sciences might be misused for bioterrorism that they have taken preemptive actions, “even in the absence of guidelines or government restrictions,” according to survey findings that were released in February by... More...

A recently refined software package, called Algorithm K*, can sort through shapes and changes of enzymes, including a key enzyme from Bacillus brevis that produces the antibiotic gramicidin S—thus providing a strategy for modifying it or other antibiotics, according to Bruce Donald of Duke... More...

A consortium of 10 Vibrio species, some well known for causing an epidemic of yellow band disease (YBD) among Caribbean coral reefs, also infects coral in the Pacific, raising questions as to how it traveled from one ocean to the other. Although six species within the consortium are novel,... More...

Russia is going back to Mars for the first time since losing a probe in 1996. However, the new probe being planned for launch this October, the Phobos-Grunt (Grunt from the Russian word for soil) is considerably more complex than was the mission that failed 13 years ago. Moreover, it risks transf... More...

“If there's a superhero microbe, it's Deinococcus radiodurans,” says Michael J. Daly from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. For this bacterial extremophile to withstand massive doses of radiation and other physical insults, he adds, “what r... More...