Volume 9 Issue 4, April 2024

Carolina Rosadas explains why we need more research investigating human T lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) infections, and why more public visibility is needed for those affected.

Extracellular vesicles carrying phosphatidylserine on their surface, found in large quantities in semen, saliva and breast milk, but not in blood, provide an innate defence strategy by blocking viral entry through competition for binding to cellular phosphatidylserine receptors, explaining why many viruses are transmitted by blood rather than by these body fluids.

A ‘reverse translation’ strategy using gnotobiotic mice ascertains cause and effect relationships between bacterial members of the gut microbiota, dietary components and host physiology, which are difficult to establish in human nutritional trials.

FEAR is an ancestral histone chaperone complex that can control virus infections in an interferon-independent manner.

Characterizing bacterial responses to mixtures of chemical pollutants reveals interactive effects among pollutants. Our study highlights the predictability and resilience of microbial responses to complex mixtures of pollutants, offering the potential for improvements in ecotoxicological assessments.

This Review discusses how organ-on-chip models can applied for infectious disease research.

Phosphatidylserine-exposing extracellular vesicles in body fluids can inhibit infection of viruses that use viral apoptotic mimicry for infection, but not viruses that use other entry mechanisms.

Prevotella copri, together with other microbiota members, plays a key role in mediating the beneficial effects of a gut microbiota-directed complementary food for malnourished children on microbiota and host functions.

Testing 255 combinations of chemicals versus bacterial communities shows species diversity contributes to resilience against increasingly complex stressor mixtures.

Toll-interacting protein (TOLLIP) prevents inflammation and lipid accumulation in alveolar macrophages to limit integrated stress response activation, macrophage necrosis and promote control of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Phylogenetic analysis of halophilic archaea, including two previously undescribed clades, reveals four independent evolutionary adaptations to hypersaline environments, caused by duplications and horizontal gene transfers.

Cryogenic electron microscopy analysis of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis membrane-bound phosphoribosyltransferase Rv3806c provides mechanistic insight into cell wall precursor synthesis.

The FEAR pathway acts via FACT and ETS-1 and elicits antiviral responses against various DNA and RNA viruses independent of interferons, which are countered by poxvirus A51R proteins.

Longitudinal profiling of the nasal and faecal microbiomes of 66 dairy farmers and 166 dairy cows over a year-long period shows that microbes acquired from cow microbiomes introduce clinically relevant antimicrobial resistance genes to farmer guts.

GvpU regulates spatial organization of gas vesicles in the bacterial cytosol through tunable interactions with the core gas vesicle shell protein and phase transition, enabling future opportunities for engineering of cellular buoyancy.

A model to predict bacterial community assembly is devised on the basis of experimental data reporting competition for resources in vitro.

Single-molecule imaging reveals that peptidoglycan synthesis and synthase activity, rather than FtsZ treadmilling, are rate limiting and drive septum constriction in Staphylococcus aureus.

Live-cell single-molecule imaging reveals a single population of processive septal peptidoglycan synthases moving asynchronously with FtsZ that drive Bacillus subtilis cell constriction in a manner partially dependent upon FtsZ treadmilling.

Preclinical characterization of the SARS-CoV-2 M^pro inhibitor RAY1216 shows improved in vivo pharmacokinetics compared with nirmatrelvir.

Cryo-EM analysis of the substrate-bound T9SS from Flavobacterium johnsoniae reveals an extended translocon complex and provides insight into protein secretion.

WISH-tags can be used in combination with quantitative polymerase chain reaction or next-generation sequencing to decipher population dynamics at the strain level within plant and mammalian microbiotas.

A DNA barcoding approach enables discrimination between bacterial strains that could not be distinguished with conventional microbial marker gene amplicon sequencing techniques.

Integration of differential and conventional RNA sequencing and transposon mutant fitness data for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron grown under 15 different conditions provides an expression atlas, expands the regulatory RNA repertoire and reveals that the small RNA MasB regulates susceptibility to tetracyclines.