MicrobeWorld

We are still waiting with bated breath for the day scientists resurrect the woolly mammoth. Until then, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with resurrections of ancient plants and bacteria - which may be more amazing anyway, because they're even older. The dish in the above image holds a bacterium ... Read More

A group of diseases that kill millions of people each year can’t be touched by antibiotics, and some treatment is so harsh the patient can’t survive it. They’re caused by parasites, and for decades researchers have searched for a “magic bullet” to kill them without harming the patient. Now, a te... Read More

Rice University researchers report too small a dose may enhance microbes’ immunity

Rice University researchers have settled a long-standing controversy over the mechanism by which silver nanoparticles, the most widely used nanomaterial in the world, kill bacteria.

Their work comes with a ... Read More

t may sound like snake oil, but a new study suggests scorpion venom contains a substance that can fend off drug-resistant bacteria, including the deadly MRSA.

Drug resistance is increasingly rendering our antibiotic arsenal ineffective against bacteria. According to a CDC study, MRSA caused 3... Read More

Researchers Jose Cordova of Yale University and Erich Astudillo of Chile’s Universidad de Santiago discovered a molecule they call Keep 32 that kills the bacteria responsible for all the trauma you suffered as a child, lying down blinded by the light as a masked man poked bits of metal in your m... Read More

To the left is a panel from a new paper in PLoS Genetics, Selection-Driven Gene Loss in Bacteria. The y-axis is selection, so above 0 represents a positive selection coefficient, and below a negative one. The lineages above the x-axis then are more fit against the baseline wild type (selection c... Read More

CNN.com article about the recent illness affecting children in Cambodia Read More

Scared of bird flu? How about the viral Rift Valley fever? These diseases and many others are animal diseases that have grown the ability to infect humans. They’re known as zoonoses. You heard it, zoonoses. And humanity’s ever-growing taste for livestock products could stoke the growth of these ... Read More

After 18 months of controversy, the official verdict is in: an arsenic-tolerant bacterium found in California’s Mono Lake cannot live without phosphorus.

In 2010, a group led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a microbiologist now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, repo... Read More

I have been asked recently to write an article, somewhat along the lines of this one but longer, and with a somewhat different angle, asking a little bit different questions: What makes a science blog? Who were the first science bloggers and how long ago? How many science blogs are there? How do... Read More

By looking at signature chemical differences in the DNA of various immune cells called leukocytes, scientists have developed a way to determine their relative abundance in blood samples. The relative abundance turns out to correlate with specific cancers and other diseases, making the technique,... Read More

MISA researchers from SARDI have isolated and evaluated a ‘super strain’ of a native microalgae species that could form the basis of a local biofuels industry.

This breakthrough in biodiscovery comes after six years of ‘bioprospecting’ across thousands of kilometres of the State and into the ... Read More

I still wonder why the influenza virus H5N1 ferret transmission studies generated such fear and misunderstanding among the public, the press, and even some scientists. I still cannot fully explain what transpired, but now that the papers have been published some new clues have emerged. Read More

Physicians who see patients outside of hospital systems, such as those working in private offices, contribute disproportionately to the spread of antibiotic resistance because they are more likely to prescribe drugs unnecessarily, a first-of-its-kind nationwide study that looked at patterns of a... Read More

Cholera is an extremely virulent intestinal infection caused by ingestion of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae). EU researchers elucidated the molecular mechanisms behind expression of virulence genes with important implications for new therapies.

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"Inv... Read More

The HPV vaccine not only has resulted in a decrease in human papillomavirus infection in immunized teens but also in teens who were not immunized.

The study is believed to be the first to show a substantial decrease in HPV infection in a community setting as well as herd protection -- a decre... Read More

A third of the world’s human population is infected with a dormant tuberculosis bacteria, primarily people living in developing countries. The bacteria presents a lifelong TB risk. Recent research out of the University of Copenhagen demonstrates that the risk of tuberculosis breaking out is four... Read More

By interacting with the radioactive waste and the materials used to contain it, underground microorganisms may affect the safety of nuclear waste repositories, for better or for worse.

Underground, time appears to stand still. That is one of the reasons why deep geological formations are cons... Read More

It was a provocative finding: strange bacteria in a California lake that thrived on something completely unexpected — arsenic. What it suggested is that life, a very different kind of life, could possibly exist on some other planet.

The research, published by a leading scientific journal in 2... Read More

Scientists may have pinpointed a potential way to prevent the flu by identifying a protein that amps up the immune system, according to a new animal study.

The synthetic protein, called EP67, is able to trigger an immune response to the "threat" of the flu virus within a couple of hours in mi... Read More