MicrobeWorld

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Roberto Cattaneo, ... Read More

Medical implants like catheters and pacemakers can be a hotspot for bacteria, which grow in hard-to-treat films on the surface of such devices. Scientists and engineers are taking different approaches to changing the surface of implants so bacteria can’t take hold. For example, some groups are d... Read More

Infants' early growth is influenced by the types of bacteria in their digestive system, a new study says.

A variety of bacteria quickly populate the sterile digestive tract of a newborn. Norwegian researchers identified connections between specific types of bacteria and infant growth rates.
... Read More

A groundbreaking study from a well-renowned team of Danish researchers could bring unprecedented relief for sufferers of chronic back pain.

According to the study, which appeared in the European Spine Journal, as much as 40 percent of chronic lower back pain is caused by bacteria. Treating th... Read More

It's easy to forget just how far medicine has progressed. While we may worry about the spread of infectious diseases like avian flu or meningitis today, those pathogens have nothing on fearsome pandemics in the distant past like the Plague of Justinian, which killed over 100 million people from ... Read More

Scientists at a local laboratory say a new piece of technology there can identify bacteria a day earlier than traditional methods.

"If it's a blood infection or meningitis, getting that identification as fast as we can can mean the difference between life and death," said Karen Calvert, a mic... Read More

Bacteria on a surface wander around and often organize into highly resilient communities known as biofilms. It turns out that they organize in a rich-get-richer pattern similar to the distribution of wealth in the U.S. economy, according to a new study by researchers at University of California,... Read More

Women suffering from recurring urinary tract infections may carry a particularly hearty strain of E. coli bacteria that flourishes in both the gut and the bladder, and can migrate back and forth despite repeated treatments, a small new study finds.

Doctors believe that urinary tract infection... Read More

In the summer of 1968, a new strain of influenza appeared in Hong Kong. This strain, known as H3N2, spread around the globe and eventually killed an estimated 1 million people.

A new study from MIT reveals that there are many strains of H3N2 circulating in birds and pigs that are genetically ... Read More

French health officials said Friday they are investigating three suspected cases of a deadly new respiratory virus related to SARS, in people who had close contact in the hospital with France's only confirmed case.

Beatrice Degrugillers, a spokeswoman for the regional health agency in France'... Read More

Amoeba eat bacteria and other human pathogens, engulfing and destroying them – or being destroyed by them, but how these single-cell organisms distinguish and respond successfully to different bacterial classes has been largely unexplained.

In a report in the journal Current Biology, research... Read More

Researchers have found a strain of bacteria that can infect mosquitoes and make them resistant to the malaria parasite. The study, in the journal Science, showed the parasite struggled to survive in infected mosquitoes. Malaria is spread between people by the insects so it is hoped that giving m... 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

Bacteria may draw other bacteria to a site of infection by laying down trails of a “molecular glue” that lead free-swimming individuals to come together and organize into colonies.

In the study, researchers were looking at how a species of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa attach and mov... Read More

As the bacteria grow within a biofilm, they organize themselves into reproducible patterns and shapes that can be predicted with mathematical models.
Image: Confocal microscopy of a bacterial biofilm composed of Escherichia coli expressing the fluorescent proteins mCherry and sfGFP. The image w... Read More

A 65-year-old Frenchman is hospitalized after contracting France's first case of a deadly new respiratory virus related to SARS, and French health authorities said Wednesday they are trying to find anyone who might have been in contact with him to prevent it from spreading.

It's unclear how o... Read More

Through the serendipity of science, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a potential treatment for deadly, drug-resistant bacterial infections that uses the same approach that HIV uses to infect cells.

The National Institutes of Health-supported discovery will be descr... Read More

Researchers from UNSW have cautioned that more work is needed to understand how micro-organisms respond to the disinfecting properties of silver nano-particles, increasingly used in consumer goods, and for medical and environmental applications.

Although nanosilver has effective antimicrobial... Read More

Scientists have long believed that measuring the amount of HIV in a person’s blood is an indicator of whether the virus is actively reproducing.

A University of Delaware-led research team reports new evidence that hidden virus replication may be occurring within the body’s tissue, despite un... Read More

On May 8th JoVE will publish research that demonstrates how a biosensor can detect antibiotic resistance in bacteria. This new technology is a preliminary step in identifying and fighting superbugs, a major public health concern that has led to more deaths than AIDS in the United States in recen... Read More