Microbe Magazine

Although new social media such as Twitter provide a “rich environment,” loaded with information, that information is “full of noise” making it “difficult to extract signals,” says John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. Once extracted, however, those signals provide a novel mea... More...

Losses in bacterial biodiversity in the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients correlate with worsening disease, according to George A. O'Toole of Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H., and his collaborators. Until recently, the numbers of colonizing microbial species in th... More...

The United States is experiencing an unusually high number of human infections from West Nile virus (WNV). The number of reported cases is the highest through the third week of October since 2003, according to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. Moreo... More...

The conductive pili, or nanowires, of the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens carry a catalytically active uranium reductase that converts soluble uranium (IV), which is toxic, into a mineral form that is insoluble and thus no longer toxic, according to Gemma Reguera... More...

Some bacteria make and maintain biodegradable beads—biobeads, made of polyesters and capable of incorporating proteins—along their outer surfaces, according to Bernd Rehm, professor and chair of microbiology at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. “Beads with desired protein functi... More...

Gut microbes break down dietary nutrients that their hosts cannot, conferring novel metabolic capabilities that can shape the health of those hosts. Microbiota-mediated metabolism can create diet-dependent positive or negative selective pressure to drive host evolution. It fits neatly with the Ho... More...