Microbe Magazine

DNA provides a capacious medium for storing digital information at densities much higher than those being used in the computer industry, according to George Church and Sriam Kosuri of Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, both in Boston, Mass., and t... More...

Cytokines, not antigens, launch T cells against invasive microbial pathogens, and only later do the refinements of antigen recognition come into play, according to Gregoire Lauvau and his collaborators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, N.Y. Thus, they c... More...

The molecular chaperone Hsp90 is what appears to be the Achilles' heel of fungal pathogens—a target that, once inhibited, helps to avoid or overcome resistance to other antifungal drugs, according to Leah Cowen of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. However, because simila... More...

Faster methods of sequencing microbial genomes might hold a key to understanding those microbes well enough to culture some isolates that are considered among the most intractable, according to Joerg Graf of the University of Connecticut in Storrs and his collaborators. He spoke during the 2012 I... More...

Incubating wood with iodide salts and the oxidizing enzyme, laccase, yields a surface that resists attack by molds and other wood-destroying microbes, according to Mark Schubert of Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and his collaborators. D... More...

Much of the recent innovative work in antibacterials was aimed at inhibiting DNA gyrase and topoisomerase, the same targets as quinolone antibiotics, judging from the poster summary session, “Early New Antimicrobial Agents,” convened as part of the 2012 Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Ag... More...