MicrobeWorld

Hilary Koprowski flanked by Vincent Racaniello and Richard Kessin on the occasion of Dr. Koprowski's 'History of Science' lecture at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, April 2005. Read More

Researchers from the University of Tübingen have been able to show for the first time how microorganisms contributed to the formation of the world's biggest iron ore deposits. The biggest known deposits -- in South Africa and Australia -- are geological formations billions of years old. They are... Read More

One of the big mysteries of AIDS is why some HIV-positive people take more than a decade to progress to full-blown AIDS, if they progress at all. A group of investigators from the Multi-Center AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), housed within the UCLA AIDS Institute, may have uncovered the key to this var... Read More

In the mid-19th century, if you had wanted to have a scientific fight, you could have picked no better subject than palaeontology. Fossils pouring out of the mines, quarries and railway cuttings of the industrial revolution were undermining the biblical accounts of creation and early history, th... Read More

The proportion of young women diagnosed with genital warts in Australia has seen a significant decline thanks to the HPV vaccine, suggests a new paper. In 2007, Australia became one of the first countries to implement a nationally funded quadrivalent human papillomarivus (HPV) vaccination progra... Read More

In this blog post, I show how students in my freshman "introduction to cell and molecular biology" course used "creativity"-based approaches to better understand concepts in the course---as they prepare for their upcoming final exam. I believe that this kind of approach truly helps with student... Read More

Following up on our coverage of the work of John Rogers, who is leading efforts at University of Illinois to develop flexible and bioresorbable electronic systems, there’s news now of new findings evaluating such implants in animal models.

Presented at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition ... Read More

For what may be the first time, researchers have discovered a virus inside a host with a non-standard nuclear genetic code — one that differs from the standard genetic code that almost all living things use to produce proteins.


“The finding is significant because it shows that these viruses... Read More

The bacteria that cause acne live on everyone’s skin, yet one in five people is lucky enough to develop only an occasional pimple over a lifetime. What’s the secret?

In a boon for teenagers everywhere, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of Cal... Read More

The arms race between bacteria and viruses just got a microscopic bit hotter.

The phenomenon, which was published in Nature this week, was discovered by Kimberly Seed and colleagues when they looked at bacteriophages who usually infect and kill the bacterium responsible for cholera Vibrio cho... Read More

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a labo... Read More

On this Mothers' Day, I reflect on the role my late mother had on my own decision to become a scientist. We all owe are mothers a great deal, and not just for the mitochondria! So hurray for mothers everywhere! Read More

What is more commonplace than saying that prokaryotic cells possess a nucleoid? It is implicit in the term prokaryote itself. Still, it was not shown definitively until the 1940s that bacteria and archaea have such differentiated structures made up of condensed DNA. It was the careful work of “b... Read More

A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how th... Read More

Living cells are surrounded by a membrane that tightly regulates what gets in and out of the cell. This barrier is necessary for cells to control their internal environment, but it makes it more difficult for scientists to deliver large molecules such as nanoparticles for imaging, or proteins th... Read More

Over the past 30 years, the combined efforts of scientists and clinicians have delivered remarkable successes in HIV therapeutics. Since 1987, the FDA has approved more than 30 antiviral drugs, including 12 HIV protease inhibitors and one integrase inhibitor. These drugs stop ~99% of viral repli... Read More

Exposing packaged liquids, fruits and vegetables to an electrical field for just minutes might eliminate all traces of foodborne pathogens on those foods, according to a Purdue University study.

Kevin Keener, a professor of food science, looks for new ways to kill harmful bacteria, such as E.... Read More

Researchers have discovered that the pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccine can generate antibodies that protect against a variety of flu strains.

The discovery brings scientists closer to designing a “universal” influenza vaccine that reliably induces broadly cross-reactive antibodies at sufficiently hi... Read More

A new technique designed to make current antibiotics more effective works by disabling select genes in bacteria.

Described in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the technique systematically identifies genes within E. coli bacteria that inhibit the production of molecules called reactive oxygen... Read More

If you were a science professor, and you received two equally strong applications for the position of laboratory manager, one from a female, one from a male, which one would you pick? The answer may surprise you.

It is well known that women are underrepresented in many fields of science. Whet... Read More