Microbe Magazine

Cover: Polarized light micrograph of crystals of the antibiotic streptomycin. Antibiotics can act as weapons or signals and mediate a broad range of interactions (see p. 282). (Image © David Parker/Science Source).
Cover: Polarized light micrograph of crystals of the antibiotic streptomycin. Antibiotics can act as weapons or signals and mediate a broad range of interactions (see p. 282). (Image © David Parker/Science Source).
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FEATURES
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Microbiology Spurred Massively Parallel Genomic Sequencing and Biotechnology
During the mid-1970s, Walter Gilbert at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., Frederick Sanger at the Medical Research Council at Cambridge in the United Kingdom (UK), and their respective collaborators developed methods to sequence short segments of DNA, initially only a few hundred bases long. The Maxam...
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Immune System Variations Affect Responses to Pathogens
Rare Toll-like receptor (TLR) deficiencies are widely recognized risk factors for infections by specific pathogens. Additionally, researchers are finding that more subtle variations in innate immune signaling pathways also contribute to susceptibility to such pathogens as well as to how individua...
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Antibiotics: Conflict and Communication in Microbial Communities
The discovery that microbes produce antibiotic compounds that kill or inhibit other microbes revolutionized modern medicine by offering a means to treat microbial infections. Thus, the “golden age” of antibiotic discovery began when hundreds of antibiotics from diverse microbial genera were chara...
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