Microbe Magazine

“If it's the worst-case scenario, half the people you know who acquire the pandemic H5N1 influenza virus will die, and half the infected people you don't know will die,” says Arturo Casadevall from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, N.Y. “If it's two orders of magnitu... More...

Totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB) last year affected a small group of patients in India, according to Zarir Udwadia of Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre in Mumbai, India, and his collaborators. Separately, say several U.S. public health experts, “It is time to sound... More...

The transmission barrier that keeps prions from jumping easily from one species to another may be far less restrictive than previously thought, according to Vincent Béringue and colleagues at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. Experiments in mice te... More...

Some archaeal species swim at warp speeds, traversing 400–500 body lengths per second, making them relatively speaking the fastest known organisms on the planet, according to Bastian Herzog and Reinhard Wirth of the University of Regensburg in Regensburg, Germany. This archaeal speediness overtur... More...

Anaerobic microorganisms generate electrical currents along deep-sea hydrothermal vents, according to Peter Girguis and Mark Nielsen from Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., whose findings are based on in situ measurements at such sites in the Mothra hydrothermal field on the Juan de Fuca rid... More...

Amphotericin B (AmB) kills fungi by binding ergosterol, a critical lipid in their cell membranes, according to chemist Martin Burke at the University of Illinois (UI) in Urbana-Champaign, and his collaborators. Thus, they debunk the long-held notion that this important antifungal agent kills such... More...