MicrobeWorld

TEM picture of HEK 293 cells with clatherin coated vesicles

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As the lakefront officially opens to swimmers Friday, the Lake Michigan shoreline joins the cutting edge in the war on bacteria after decades of using day-old water samples to decide whether to close beaches.

In Chicago, the Park District will use a new high-tech system that uses computer sof... Read More

Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have identified the structure of a critical RSV component called the fusion glycoprotein.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is a respiratory virus that infects th... Read More

This is a movie by David Bella, Ph.D., at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research showing the results of an analysis of Adenovirus binding to blood coagulation factor X, performed in collaboration with Professor Andrew H Baker in the University of Glasgow.

The animation was creat... Read More

US outbreak foxes a leading web-based method for tracking seasonal flu. When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance... Read More

Microbes turn nutrient in beef into an artery-clogging menace. Lean steak is low in fat and cholesterol and high in protein — qualities normally considered healthy. But eating a lot of it can still cause heart disease. Researchers have now laid the blame on bacteria in the human gut that convert... Read More

In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest algae bloom in its recorded history. At its peak in October, the mat of green scum on the lake’s surface was nearly four inches thick and covered an area of almost 2,000 square miles. That’s three times larger than any other bloom in the lake, ever. Plu... Read More

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. What effect does this process have on the microorganisms that naturally exist in the water in this process?

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Good microbiologists question assumptions. How about the assumption that semesters are the best calendars for learning? What would happen if rather than taking four courses concurrently during a semester, students instead took those four courses successively, one at a time? This describes the Co... Read More

New scientific research published today in the journal PLoS Biology shows that bacteria can evolve resistance more quickly when stronger antibiotics are used.

Researchers from the University of Exeter and Kiel University in Germany treated E. coli with different combinations of antibiotics in... Read More

Tumor necrosis factor – normally an infection-fighting substance produced by the body – can actually heighten susceptibility to tuberculosis if its levels are too high. University of Washington TB researchers unravel this conundrum in a report this week in Cell. Their study shows how excess prod... Read More

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are part of the innate immune system that is widely distributed in nature, acting as a defense mechanism against invading microorganisms. AMPs have potent antimicrobial activity against a range of microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses. In view of grow... Read More

Two dangerous things together might make a medicine for one of the hardest cancers to treat. In a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, researchers have shown that bacteria can deliver deadly radiation to tumours — exploiting the immune suppression that normally makes the disease so intractable.

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Temperatures on the surface of the tropical South Atlantic Ocean in July can predict the severity of malaria outbreaks in northwestern India that begin to peak four months later, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have discovered.

The correlation they have found between ocean tempera... Read More

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute have developed a new method for studying the complex molecular workings of Anopheles albimanus, an important but less studied spreader of human malaria. An. albimanus carries Plasmodium vivax, the primary cause of malaria in humans in S... Read More

The first red alga genome has just been sequenced by an international team coordinated by CNRS and UPMC at the Station Biologique de Roscoff (Brittany), notably involving researchers from CEA-Genoscope[1], the universities of Lille 1 and Rennes 1 and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle[2]. ... Read More

New research, just published, details how University of Cincinnati researchers have developed and tested a solar-powered nano filter that is able to remove harmful carcinogens and antibiotics from water sources – lakes and rivers – at a significantly higher rate than the currently used filtering... Read More

A simple new method better assesses the risks posed by emerging zoonotic viruses (those transmissible from animals to humans), according to a study published in PLOS Medicine this week. Dr. Simon Cauchemez and colleagues from Imperial College London in the UK and the Centers for Disease Control ... Read More

Harvard research reveals the role of the flagellum in helping biofilms colonize rough surfaces. New research from Harvard University helps to explain how waterborne bacteria can colonize rough surfaces—even those that have been designed to resist water.

A team of materials scientists and mic... Read More

Most people are fascinated by the colorful and exotic coral reefs, which form habitats with probably the largest biodiversity. But human civilisation is the top danger to these fragile ecosystems through climate change, oxygen depletion and ocean acidification. Industrialisation, deforestation a... Read More