Borrelia burgdorferi is a spirochete, a class of long, slender bacteria that typically take on a coiled shape. Infection with this bacterium causes Lyme disease.
Credit: Tina Carvalho, University of Hawaii at Manoa, NIGMS photo gallery Read More
The superbugs have met their match.
Conceived at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), it comes in the form of a coating which has a magnetic-like feature that attracts bacteria and kills them without the need for antibiotics. The killer coating, which has shown to destroy 99 per cent of... Read More 
Beer discovered two years ago onboard a shipwreck from the mid-1800s could possibly be recreated using living bacteria discovered in the brew, Finnish researchers announced last Thursday.
According to Terhi Kinnunen of Reuters, Annika Wilhelmson from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland s... Read More 
The first study using cultivation independent sequencing of the microorganisms in the adolescent male urinary tract has revealed that the composition of microbial communities colonizing the penis in young men depends upon their circumcision status and patterns of sexual activity.
This study, ... Read More
The Society for General Microbiology (UK) publication Microbiology Today has a two page feature by Paul Duprex, Ph.D., Boston University, on Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D., Columbia University, and his popular podcast This Week in Virology. The article discusses Racaniello's use of new media to sprea...
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Joe writes: How cool is that to be listening to you all reading my emails with Peter Sandman while I am stuck in traffic. I loved the discussion and want to send a big thank you to Michael for joining in and giving us the missing perspective of what the NSABB ... Read More
Russian scientists have now poured 60 tonnes of freon and kerosene down the four-kilometre bore hole that plunges through the ice above Lake Vostok in Antarctica. This will stop the hole freezing up during the long Antarctic winter. When summer comes, the Russian team will return to drill the la...
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The epithelial cells that line the intestines fire bacteria-fighting “bullets” into the gut, Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered.
The findings, featured on the cover of the April 10 issue of Current Biology, represent a new mechanism for defending the body against gut microbes. ... Read More
In a very exciting paper, this study showed that in a mouse model of intestinal bacterial infections using Citrobacter rodentium, commensal bacteria were required to clear the infection. The ability of the commensal bacteria to outcompete the invading C. rodentium pathogen was shown to be in pa...
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Learn about the bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms that maintain human health.
The body contains 10 times more bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms than human cells. Most of these species are harmless—although they can still cause illness if they wind up in the wrong place. In add... Read More
When members of a travel soccer team in Oregon fell ill last year, the details of how the disease spread through the team were mysterious. Kimberly Repp, an epidemiologist in Washington County, Oregon, describes the medical detective work that led epidemiologists through the chain of transmissio...
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A panel of U.S. experts has recommended federal approval of the first drug shown to prevent HIV — the virus that causes AIDS.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel held two separate votes Thursday on recommending the drug Truvada for healthy people at high risk of AIDS — one fo... Read More 
Cryptococcus gattii and C. neoformans are very closely related fungi, but when it comes to the infections they cause there are some important differences. In their study in mBio this week, Ngamskulrungroj et al. drilled down into those differences using a mouse model and found that C. gatii may ...
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Ron Fouchier (pictured), of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, is the lead author of a controversial paper which lays out how deadly H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, can be made deadlier still. He believes this information should be widely disseminated, so that biologists can work on dru...
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It was all too evident during the Dust Bowl what a disastrous impact wind can have on dry, unprotected topsoil. Now a new study has uncovered a less obvious, but still troubling, effect of wind: Not only can it carry away soil particles, but also the beneficial microbes that help build soil, det...
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An international research team led by Virginia Tech Associate Professor Boris Vinatzer and Giorgio Balestra of the University of Tuscia in Italy has used the latest DNA sequencing technology to trace a devastating pathogen back to its likely origin.
Since 2008, Pseudomonas syringae pv. actini... Read More
Lill-Karin Skaret, a 67-year-old grandmother from Namsos, Norway, was traveling to a lakeside vacation villa near India's port city of Kochi in March 2010 when her car collided with a truck. She was rushed to the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, her right leg broken and her artificial hip s...
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