MicrobeWorld

As much as dog owners love their children, they tend to share more of themselves, at least in terms of bacteria, with their canine cohorts rather than their kids.

That is just one finding of a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder that looked at the types and transfer modes of m... Read More

The head of the World Health Organization warned the world this week of a new virus, awkwardly dubbed MERS-CoV, found in Saudi Arabia.

"Looking at the overall global situation, my greatest concern right now is the novel coronavirus," Margaret Chan said, calling it "a threat to the entire worl... Read More

A new research project involving researchers from Bath aims to develop novel self-healing concrete that uses an inbuilt immune system to close its own wounds and prevent deterioration.

The life of concrete structures is reduced when the material cracks and water is able to get at the steel re... Read More

Health officials say they still don't understand how a lesser-known bird flu virus was able to kill two men and seriously sicken a woman in China, but that it's unlikely that it can spread easily among humans.

Two men in Shanghai became the first known human fatalities from the H7N9 bird flu ... Read More

Scientists have combined MRI and imaging mass spectrometry to visualize the body’s inflammatory response to a bacterial infection in 3D. The techniques, described in Cell Host & Microbe, offer opportunities for discovering proteins not previously implicated in the inflammatory response.

Eric ... Read More

Scientists are great at growing E. coli in the lab. They know exactly under which conditions various strains thrive. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be learned from the bacteria’s behavior in an ideal, isolated and ultimately unrealistic environment. That is why a group of research... Read More

In a piece of work carried out by the Carbohydrate Metabolism Research Team of the Institute of Agrobiotechnology (a centre jointly owned by the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre, the Spanish National Scientific Research Council-CSIC, and the Government of Navarre), the discovery has been ma... Read More

A method that promises to reduce by more than half the time it takes health officials to identify Salmonella strains has been developed by researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

The finding is important because it promises to significantly speed up the response to many ... Read More

Patients in Vietnam and other locations with central nervous system infections may well be suffering from the effects of a newly discovered virus. Researchers have detected a virus they're calling CyCV-VN in spinal fluid from 4% of 642 patients with central nervous system infections of unknown c... Read More

Bathing all patients daily with a germ-killing soap and swabbing antibiotic ointment in their noses may be the best way to reduce the spread of deadly infections, including MRSA.

In a new study, these measures reduced the bloodstream infections caused by dangerous pathogens, including the dru... Read More

Because of their central importance to biology, proteins have been the focus of intense research, particularly the manner in which they are produced from genetically coded templates -- a process commonly known as translation. While the general mechanism of translation has been understood for som... Read More

The word 'unnatural' is often used to describe what's considered weird or unusual. But is anything weirder than nature?

Just look at 17-year cicadas, poised to flood the U.S. East Coast after having stayed underground since Bill Clinton was President. And cicadas are just the start: Biology a... Read More

Researchers and physicians in the field could soon run on-the-spot tests for environmental toxins, medical diagnostics, food safety and more with their smartphones.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a cradle and app for the iPhone that uses the phone's buil... Read More

"Pharmaceutical residues are becoming increasingly a problem for the environment. Sewage plants do not decompose these substances completely. The problem will worsen if one considers, for example, the rising proportion of elderly people in our society who actually account for the increased consu... Read More

Usually, when you mention bacteria in connection with water, it’s a bad thing. But one Texas A&M engineering researcher believes the right bacteria are a natural weapon for fighting an emerging water contaminant: estrogen.

Increasingly sensitive methods of screening water for polluting substa... Read More

In April three biohackers from a California Do-It-Yourself biology lab, BioCurious, posted a Kickstarter campaign to crowdsource their plan to bioengineer a glowing plant. They asked for $65,000. But by the close of their campaign at midnight on Thursday, June 6, they had raised a remarkable $48... Read More

It's a question we ask about many recently discovered bacteria: What, exactly, do the Verrucomicrobial do in the environment? Since their discovery, representatives of the phylum Verrucomicrobia have been detected in soil and aquatic environments around the world, but we have very few existing i... Read More

Pharmaceutical experts NSF DBA have created an interactive guide to hand washing.
Read More

Vaccines are just for kids, right? Not any more. U.S. health officials now recommend at least a half dozen vaccines for adults, to prevent pneumococcus virus, hepatitis, shingles and other ailments. And although the portion of adults who get these vaccinations rises slightly each year, the rates... Read More

Amidst the outrage, puzzlement and theories caused by the finding of genetically-modified wheat in an Oregon field, USDA is considering whether to commercialize another dinnertime staple–the potato.

Last month, Idaho-based J.M. Simplot asked the Agriculture Department to grant a deregulated s... Read More