Microbe Magazine

Many members of the community of microbiologists are well aware of the enormous contributions of Malcolm Casadaban to microbiology and to biology more generally. His series of ingenious and widely used approaches to the generation of gene fusions in bacteria influenced the research of microbiolog... More...

Clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are found in roughly half of sequenced bacterial genomes and 90 percent of archaeal genomes. Complementarity between mature CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) and sequences found within phages or plasmids leads to inhibition of their replicati... More...

Candida albicans is commonly commensal in humans, but can become invasive when the immune defenses have been compromised. Like many microbes, C. albicans secretes chemicals that change behaviors of neighboring cells. One of these, farnesol, influences the fungus' transitions between the noni... More...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infects one-third of the world's population, killing 1.8 million annually. The disease is very difficult to eradicate, requiring at least half a year's treatment with antibiotics. In earlier work, Christina Stallings of Washington University, St. Louis, ... More...

Scientists have studied the role of different M. tuberculosis-encoded proteins with special plasmid vectors that enable genes to be expressed in different bacterial species. Nicolai van Oers of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, et al. reengineered... More...

David Thomas of Cardiff University, UK, et al. show that a low-molecular-weight, alginate nanomedicine known as OligoG can boost the efficacy of conventional antibiotics up to 512-fold against multidrug resistant pathogens including Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter, and Burkholderia species. OligoG “ha... More...

The skin is the largest organ system of the human body and requires special attention. It separates the inside of our body from the outside world, and thus acts as an important barrier against various types of environmental damage, including mechanical, chemical, and microbial. Elston's book... More...

Have you noticed an antiscience attitude creeping into contemporary society? Large portions of the public no longer trust clinicians and scientists, preferring instead to follow charismatic individuals with no science background who shun vaccinations, believe intelligent design trumps evolution, ... More...

ASM/IUSSTF Indo–U.S. Professorships. Take advantage of this opportunity, sponsored by the Indo–U.S. Science & Technology Forum, to teach a short course and share your knowledge with young scientists through the Visiting Teaching Professorship. Or collaborate with an est... More...

22–26 October 2012.