MicrobeWorld

It is invisible to the naked eye and originated in the uninhabitable climes of Antarctica. This humble bacteria — known as Psychrophile — holds the potential to solve India's sanitation problem in the years to come. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is using these bacteria... Read More

Two papers published this week, and one last month, reveal the pandemic potential of H5N1 "bird flu". One identifies four, another identifies five, genetic changes the virus would have to undergo before it could spread easily in humans, and the third paper suggests some of these changes are alre... Read More

The Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone for 2012 is expected to be the second smallest on record—but not because of any cutback in nitrogen use.

Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste—some of it from as far away as the Corn Belt—is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus tha... Read More

A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis has been keeping a wary eye on emerging tick-borne diseases in Missouri for the past dozen years, and they have just nailed down another part of the story.

They knew from earlier work that the animal reservoirs for the diseases includ... Read More

Two specific strains of bacteria that appear linked to indoor mold caused by water damage have been identified by researchers.

Bacterial contamination in water-damaged buildings can cause health problems such as infection and respiratory conditions such as asthma. But until now, no specific b... Read More

A rare type of deadly bacteria was found in two patients in a Rhode Island hospital in 2011, but swift treatment and infection control measures stopped any further spread, a new government report shows.

The bacterium -- called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM)-producing Klebsiella pneumo... Read More

There’s a microscopic fungus that can starve nations and punch through Kevlar. It causes disease on such as scale that its blight can be seen from space. It’s called Magnaporthe oryzae and it causes a disease known as rice blast. The fungus doesn’t infect humans, but it does kill rice. It kills ... Read More

Only a few key mutations could cause the avian influenza virus to become airborne and transmissible among mammals, according to a controversial new paper publishing online today. In detailed research involving ferrets, researchers at the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands engineered a pot... Read More

The second of two papers on avian influenza H5N1 virus that caused such a furor in the past year was published today in the journal Science. I have carefully read the paper by Fouchier and colleagues, and I assure you that it does not enable the production of a deadly biological weapon. The resu... Read More

The more controversial of two papers describing how the lethal H5N1 bird flu could be made easier to spread was published on Thursday, six months after a scientific advisory board suggested that the papers’ most potentially dangerous data be censored.

The paper’s publication, in the journal S... Read More

A coating of selenium nanoparticles significantly reduces bacteria growth on polycarbonate, a material common in implanted medical devices.

Selenium is an inexpensive element that naturally belongs in the body. It is also known to combat bacteria. Still, it had not been tried as an antibiotic... Read More

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has developed a new diagnostic test to detect the presence of dengue virus in people with symptoms of dengue fever or dengue hemorrhagic fever. The test, called the CDC DENV-1-4 Real Time RT PCR Assay, has been authorized by the Food and Drug Admini... Read More

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The authors of a study in mBio this week examined the genomes of two Bd isolates to find clues about its pathogenicity, reasoning that the Bd genome must bear the marks of restructuring to adapt to its new environmental niche and exploit its amphibian hosts. Compared with its fellow phylum membe... Read More

A number of variables can cause signficant changes in the human microbiome early in life including birth method and antibiotic exposure. Understanding these shifts is important because new research suggests that shifts in the microbiome of infants could make them more prone to gain weight as adu... Read More

The NIH Human Microbiome Project has been a 5-year endeavor to produce community resources to support the field of human microbiome research. Although the HMP has already produced hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, in the past week 2 major HMP Consortium papers as well as 20+ companion pap... Read More