Microbe Magazine

Thank you for the Forum article by Kaplan and Burgess in February Microbe discussing alarming workforce shortages in the diagnostic laboratories of the United States (Microbe, February 2011, p. 52). The writers are correct—it is critic... More...

Campylobacter jejuni, a frequent contaminant of poultry and cause of gastroenteritis, is a major food safety concern. Yiping He of the United States Department of Agriculture and collaborators in China and the United States show that ZnO nanoparticle... More...

Bacterial cell division requires coordination of many proteins to complete cell constriction and separation in an efficient manner. In earlier work, Jodi Camberg, Joel Hoskins, and Sue Wickner of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., showed that the More...

Klebsiella pneumoniae is a gram-negative bacterium that causes severe nosocomial infections in immunocompromised individuals, such as septicemia, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections. In the last two decades, a highly invasive More...

Unsafe injections cause 1.3 million deaths annually, and currently available needleless vaccination systems have limitations including cost, cross-contamination, pain, and bleeding. Now Dipshikha Chakravortty and colleagues of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore demonstrate a novel, need... More...

The skin is rich in immune cells that initiate immune response against pathogens. Now William C. Weldon of Emory University School of Medicine et al. show in a mouse model that vaccination with microneedles coated with influenza antigens, which delivers the vaccine to these immune cells, “induces... More...

21–24 May 2011.

Bacteria capable of sporulation go out of their way to grow rather than sporulate. They will therefore try to obtain needed nutrients, even at the cost of killing their neighbors. When starved for nutrients, cells of Bacillus subtilis engage in cannibalism, that is,... More...