Microbe Magazine

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FEATURES
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Helping Educational Reforms To Succeed in a Microbiology Department
During the past decade, a rising chorus has called for major reforms in how we teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Part of the impetus for those reforms comes from concerns over growing numbers of students leaving the sciences, the eroding stature of the United States in the ...
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The CRISPR System Protects Microbes against Phages, Plasmids
Many scientists believe that phages are the most abundant life form on Earth. Although phages outnumber their bacterial prey 10-fold, bacteria persist, sometimes relying on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) of DNA sequence as a defense mechanism. CRISPRs, first r...
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Commensals: Underappreciated Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotic resistance, reported for sulfonamides in the mid-1930s and for penicillins in the 1940s, remains a stubborn quandary. What was once confined mainly to hospitals increasingly involves multidrug resistance that encompasses communities and encircles the globe. Virtually all types of bacte...
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