MicrobeWorld

The US government has taken delivery of the first drug said to cure smallpox. It was developed under a government plan to buy biodefence drugs that would otherwise stall in development for lack of a market. The country plans to buy enough to treat two million people, for $410 million.

On the ... Read More

Treating people with HIV rapidly after they have become infected with the virus that causes Aids may be enough to achieve a "functional cure" in a small proportion of patients diagnosed early, according to research.

Scientists in France who followed 14 patients who were treated swiftly with H... Read More

Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes have a devastating impact on global health and the situation is complicated due to difficulties with both existing control measures and the impact of climate change. Genetically modified mosquitoes that are refractory to disease transmission are seen as having ... Read More

For the first time we are close to creating artificial life from scratch. So says Craig Venter, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and famed for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome.

"We think we're close, but we've not submitted a paper yet," he said ... Read More

There is still time to ward off medical disaster - but we need to think two steps ahead, not one

IF YOU'RE reading this article, antibiotics have probably saved your life – and not once but several times. A rotten tooth, a knee operation, a brush with pneumonia; any number of minor infections... Read More

A large-scale study of a biomedical intervention that potentially offers novel options for women to protect themselves from HIV infection has, to the surprise of many researchers, failed. But the results say more about the participants’ behavior than the effectiveness of the products being teste... Read More

The first analysis of powder samples drilled out from the inside of once water-soaked rock shows Mars was a suitable place for microbial life to evolve, scientists with NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity mission said Tuesday.

Among the chemicals discovered inside the rock, called “John Klein,” were ... Read More

A potentially lethal fungal infection appears to gain virulence by being able to anticipate and disarm a hostile immune attack in the lungs, according to findings by researchers at Duke Medicine.

Defense mechanisms used by the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans enable it to lead to fatal meningit... Read More

What do cancer cells, weeds, and pathogens have in common? They all evolve resistance to the treatments that are supposed to eliminate them. However, researchers developing the next generation of antibiotics, herbicides, and anti-cancer therapeutics rarely come together to explore the common evo... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Michael Schmidt, and  Read More

Our bodies are made up by cells containing our own DNA. Plus 10 times as many with foreign DNA. The bacteria found on our skin, and inside our organs (intestine, vagina, mouth, nose, etc.) are referred to as our “microbiome”, outnumber our own cells by 10 to 1, and make up a vital organ with ind... Read More

For a little over four months in 2003, the world was gripped in the clutches of an alarming new disease, one that spread at jet speed to at least 30 countries. Then, as quickly as it emerged, SARS vanished.

The World Health Organization declared severe acute respiratory syndrome contained on ... Read More

Late last week, a Russian news outlet reported that scientists at Antarctica's Lake Vostok, buried under miles of ice, said they had found bacteria that appeared to be new to science. Now, the head of that lab has said the signature is actually just contamination, leading outside researchers to ... Read More

When Jessica Green competed in roller derby, she wondered how training, socializing and colliding with other roller girls could be affecting her health in invisible ways.

As a member of the Emerald City Roller Girls, Green went by "Thumper Biscuit" on the track, but she is also the director o... Read More

MicrobeWorld is partnering with the Society for General Microbiology (UK) to live stream two events from their Read More

Geobacter's pili conduct electrons along their length using the rings on aromatic amino acids, according to a study in mBio this week. Contrary to all other known forms of biological electron transport, in which electrons are carried by discrete entities and passed from one to another, Geobacter... Read More

This is the first episode in the MicroMinutes series on YouTube. MicroMinutes provides science entertainment and education for everyone, especially those with little exposure to classroom microbiology. The primary audience are Nerdfighters and fans of the Vlog Brothers, which means that all a... Read More

The hotel I’ve been staying at this week at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., markets its beds as being hypo-allergenic. As if that were possible. But let’s not fear microbes any longer. It is time to start embracing them. Resistance is futile anyway. They own us. The cells that make up ... Read More

Long understudied, the human microbiome—the microbes, with their genomes, that dwell in and on the human body—is now under intense scrutiny. It is increasingly clear that “the human indigenous microbial communities … play a larger role in human health and disease than previously recognized” (Nut... Read More

The search for a cure for deadly infectious disease like Tuberculosis has led a researcher for the US deep underwater.

Brian Murphy, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is collecting actinomycete bacteria from water throughout... Read More