MicrobeWorld

An antibacterial enzyme found in human tears and other body fluids could be applied to certain foods for protection against intentional contamination with anthrax, scientists reported in Boston, Massachusetts on August 26 at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

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Group A Streptococcus (GAS) is responsible for infections ranging from “strep throat” to necrotizing fasciitis, aka the “flesh-eating disease”, a severe and invasive condition that has seen a marked increase in incidence in the past 30 years. The increase has been pinned on a single clone of th... Read More

Italian researchers offer some hopeful news for parents of colicky babies: a daily dose of "good" bacteria may help their child to cry less.

After three weeks of treatment with probiotic bacteria, babies cried for an average of about a half-hour a day, while infants who received a placebo wer... Read More

Two New York lawmakers want farmers to vaccinate their chickens against salmonella, The Associated Press reported.

Sen. Daniel Squadron and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh announced their proposal in response to the nationwide recall of more than half a billion eggs linked to nearly 1,500 cases of... Read More

The brain can be a convenient hiding place for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

That's the finding of Swedish researchers who analyzed samples from about 70 HIV-infected patients who'd been taking anti-HIV drugs. The tests showed that about 10 percent of the patients -- a larger proportion th... Read More

Did you know that ASM full members from anywhere in the world may participate in the ASM Professorship Programs for Africa, Asia and Latin American and the Caribbean?

These programs provide ASM members with funding to teach hands-on, highly interactive short courses on single topics in the m... Read More

Kissing a frog won't turn it into a prince - except in fairy tales - but frog's skin can actually provide a 'kiss of death' for antibiotic-resistant germs.

Scientists have claimed that frog skin contains natural substances that could be the basis for a powerful new genre of antibiotics.

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Pathogens make themselves feel at home in the human body, invading cells and living off the plentiful amenities on offer. However, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin, together with colleagues at Harvard University, reveal an opposite strategy used to ensure inf... Read More

Dr. Nina Salama, microbiologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Affiliate Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington discusses Helicobacter pylori, a bacterira that lives in the human stomach and causes chronic disease (peptic ulcer and gastric cancer).

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Jeff Fox of Microbe magazine interviews Kim Lewis of Northeastern University--
Missing siderophores may account for why microbiologists can culture only about 1% of the microorganisms that they collect from diverse environments, according to Kim Lewis of Northeastern University and his collabor... Read More

The Global Water Challenge (GWC) is a coalition of leading organizations in the water and sanitation sector. In this video GWC finalist David Kuria of Ecotact Limited, a Kenyan company dedicated to bringing public toilets to an area where there were only two for 60,000 people, discusses the need... Read More

In order to minimize the risk of infection in mothers, women giving birth to babies by caesarean section should routinely receive antibiotics an hour before the surgery, according to a new recommendation issued Monday by a national doctor group.

Currently, women who undergo caesareans often r... Read More

As efforts continue to clean the oil that gushed from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists has found that nature's microbial helpers are hard at work too — and doing a better job than researchers had expected.

Data collected in May and June showed populations of carb... Read More

You can "check in" to restaurants and bars, so how about health clinics while you get tested for sexually transmitted diseases?

Foursquare, the online application people use to tell their friends and strangers where they are, is offering a special virtual "badge" through September to people w... Read More

It never occurred to me that the human body and a coral reef have a lot in common--until I spoke to Forest Rohwer for ... Read More

Everyone knows that house flies aren’t welcome around food.

But University of Florida scientists have discovered five new reasons why.

Researchers with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences have documented five more bacteria species carried by house flies, and all of them cause ... Read More

Researchers have linked a second type of mouse virus to a baffling condition called chronic fatigue syndrome, but said their findings do not yet prove that any virus causes the symptoms.

They found evidence of murine leukemia virus, which causes cancer in mice, in 86 percent of chronic fatigu... Read More

We tend to think of bacteria as engaging in chemical warfare only when they attack us, wreaking havoc on our cells. But the microbiome is a vicious place, with many species hurling toxins at each other, attempting to gain a competitive advantage. A bacterium called Bacillus subtilis goes beyond... Read More

An outbreak of whooping cough in California could be the worst in 50 years, the state's Department of Public Health said last week.

The disease, caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, is spread via coughing or sneezing and is highly contagious. On average, one infected person can sprea... Read More

They say Ponce de Leon looked for the Fountain of Youth in Florida, but he might have saved himself some trouble by looking a bit closer to home. A study just released by mBio links an enzyme present in almost all organisms to the reduction of age-related products called Amadori-modified protei... Read More