Microbe Magazine

“Innovations in genetic technology have allowed us to measure the contribution of every gene in an organism—specific bacteria, in our case—to its ability to survive in a given condition,” says Adam P. Arkin of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif. Details appeared online in August and... More...

Staphylococcus epidermidis Strain 115 was originally discovered on turkeys that appeared to have enhanced immunity to bacterial infections. Now Joel S. Griffitts, Richard A. Robison, and colleagues of Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, show that ... More...

Gut microbiota may influence the autoimmune disorder lupus. Hiusen Zhang, Xin M. Luo, and colleagues of Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va., show that Lactobacillus species in the guts of mouse models, commonly seen in yogurt cultures, correlate with mitigation, while More...

Mineral coatings on sand particles actually encourage microbial activity in the rapid sand filters that are used to treat groundwater for drinking. These findings resoundingly refute, for the first time, the conventional wisdom that the mineral deposits interfere with microbial colonization of th... More...

Agar growth medium revolutionized microbiology in the 1890s. But a disparity has existed between total cell counts and cultivable cell counts on plates, often referred to as the “great plate count anomaly.” Now a team of Japanese investigators from Hokkaido University and the National Institute o... More...

Elephants are among the most intelligent nonhumans, arguably on par with chimps, but both African and Asian elephants—which are separate species—are seriously endangered. Meanwhile, numerous baby Asian elephants in zoos have died of the novel herpesvirus EEHV1, identified in 1999 by Gary Hayward ... More...