Microbe Magazine

“Babies are microbial magnets,” said one participant last February during the workshop, “The Human Microbiome, Diet, and Health,” convened by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and held in Washington, D.C. Even when birth is by Caesarean section, human babies begin to ... More...

A single archaeal species, Sulfolobus islandicus, from an isolated volcanic hot spring in Kamchatka, Russia, is at the point of diverging into two new species, according to microbiologist Rachel Whitaker from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and her co... More...

Some Pseudomonas spp. that colonize the roots of wheat plants produce broad-spectrum antibiotics that vary with soil and climate conditions, according to David M. Weller of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Pullman, Was... More...

Taking revised claims about modified H5N1 influenza viruses into account, the members of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) last March reversed their earlier unanimous recommendations and called for publishing two revised reports describing that research (Microbe<... More...

When the dengue virus (DV) infects cells of interim host mosquitoes, those cells quickly begin to change the shape- and signal-controlling lipids in their membranes. Because blocking fatty acid synthesis in such cells inhibits DV, the lipid biosynthetic pathway could provide a target for controll... More...

The newly devised Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) attempts to explain how evolutionary processes sometimes simplify microorganisms, according to J. Jeffrey Morris and Richard E. Lenski at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and Erik R. Zinser at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. ... More...