MicrobeWorld

A team of researchers, including a scientist from the Viral Immunology Center at Georgia State University, have found that a type of herpesvirus infection of the eye is associated with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that causes blindness in the elderly.

The scie... Read More

Antibodies that help to stop the HIV virus have been found in breast milk. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center isolated the antibodies from immune cells called B cells in the breast milk of infected mothers in Malawi, and showed that the B cells in breast milk can generate neutralizing... Read More

When researchers conduct experiments on the way cells grow and respond to outside cues, they tend to use solutions that are much more dilute than the crowded environments found inside living cells. Now, new research from MIT shows that this dilute environment may skew the results of such experim... Read More

Infections with the bacterium Clostridium difficile hit record numbers in recent years. Now there's evidence the hard-to-treat infections are becoming a problem for children.

The infections often strike the elderly, especially those who've been taking antibiotics that clear out competing bact... Read More

Previous exposure to certain antibiotics could boost the risk of infection with drug-resistant strains of a severe fungal infection. Researchers report their findings in the May 2012 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

Candida species are frequent causes of hospital a... Read More

Clinician researchers in China have developed a vaccine that acts simultaneously against HIV-1 and M. tuberculosis (Mtb). An estimated 14 million people worldwide are coinfected with the two pathogens. The research is published in the May 2012 issue of Clinical and Vaccine Immunology.

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E Pluribus Unum, the motto of the United States, could just as well apply to biofilm-forming bacteria. Bacterial biofilms are far more resistant than individual bacteria to the armories of antibiotics we have devised to combat them. Now Tim Holm Jakobsen and Michael Givskov of the University of ... Read More

Despite their ecologic similarity, soils from three geographically distinct areas of the American southwest harbor vastly different collections of small, biosynthetic genes, a finding that suggests the existence of a far greater diversity of potentially useful products than was previously suppos... Read More

Confocal micrograph of wheat stigma hairs (blue) infected with ergot fungus (light pink). The stigma is the female part of the plant. The plant is fertilised by the (male) pollen grain, which sticks to a stigma hair causing growth of a pollen tube into the plant's ovary, causing an embryonic whe... Read More

Biomedical engineers at UC Davis have developed a microfluidic chip to test for latent tuberculosis. They hope the test will be cheaper, faster and more reliable than current testing for the disease.

"Our assay is cheaper, reusable, and gives results in real time," said Ying Liu, a research s... Read More

National Institutes of Health-funded scientists have determined the genome sequences of a dozen strains of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria known to be resistant to vancomycin, an antibiotic of last resort. The researchers demonstrated -that resistance arose independently in each strain, and ident... Read More

Baby's guts have different bacteria living inside them based on if they are bottle or breast-fed. A new study indicates these bacterial differences could lead to differences in their immune systems.

"The findings show that human milk feeding promotes the beneficial microbe population in the g... Read More

Researchers have uncovered what makes one particular strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) so proficient at picking up resistance genes, such as the one that makes it resistant to vancomycin, the last line of defense for hospital-acquired infections. They report their find... Read More

Mathematics and Biology have a long history together. It goes back to early studies on epidemiology (such as John Snow‘s on cholera and the Broad Street pump), and includes Ross’s quantitative studies that show how malaria can be controlled by careful analysis of data. And, of course, there are ... Read More

A PhD student from CSIRO and the University of Queensland has found a better way to 'spell check' gene sequences and help biologists better understand the natural world.

The student, Lauren Bragg, has contributed to the May issue of the journal Nature Methods highlighting her new approach and... Read More

Imagine you are a tiny caddisfly pupa. When you emerge from your pupal case, it is dark, but not pitch black, and high above you, you see the faint glow of a starry sky. On new wings, you rise. Cue angelic voices.

Suddenly, you struggle against an invisible barrier. Cue scary cello. You begin... Read More

In a tale worthy of Sherlock Holmes, scientists in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol, UK have solved a biochemical mystery that had previously proven elusive for 70 years: How the fungus Talaromyces stipitatus produces stipitatic acid (6), which is a tropolone, one of an atypi... Read More

U.S. health officials are proposing all baby boomers get tested for hepatitis C, because they’re five times more likely than other adults to have the potentially fatal liver virus and many might not know they’re at risk.

Of the more than 70 million baby boomers — those born from 1945 to 1965 ... Read More

Living bacteria have been discovered deep beneath the ocean where they've had no new food or oxygen since dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Buried inside 86 million-year-old red clay, they are surviving on tiny amounts of oxygen - so little that they barely qualify as life. Indeed, the discovery co... Read More

The plague, bacterial dysentery, and cholera have one thing in common: These dangerous diseases are caused by bacteria which infect their host using a sophisticated injection apparatus. Through needle-like structures, they release molecular agents into their host cell, thereby evading the immune... Read More