News & Comment

Faecal microbiota transplantation has proved efficacious for diseases such as recurrent Clostridium difficile infection via restoration of gut microbial ecology and bile acid content. However, despite its adoption by mainstream medicine, misuse of this technology in clinical or domestic settings warrants caution.

The apparent emergence of new and devastating Vibrio diseases in Latin America during significant El Niño events is striking. New microbiological, genomic and bioinformatic tools are providing us with evidence that El Niño may represent a long-distance corridor for waterborne diseases into the Americas from Asia.

Concern over Ebola becoming endemic in West Africa has appeared in the medical and lay media. Routes of transmission, rates of viral evolution, suitability of humans as hosts and rarity of spillover events make this very unlikely. Without evidence that endemic Ebola is likely, ending epidemics should remain the focus.

During public health emergencies, such as the current increase in microcephaly and neurological syndromes potentially associated with the Zika virus outbreak, a rapid and coordinated response necessitates the immediate sharing of data. Nature Microbiology policy is fully aligned with this imperative.

Widespread antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. Can we revive large-scale screening to keep the pipelines flowing or will we depend increasingly on biological and ecological insights?

Colossal microbes taking over the world sounds like a B-movie plot, rather than the business plan of a stuffed toy manufacturer. We asked Drew Oliver, the creator and CEO of Giant Microbes, about how the company came about, how their products have been received and his plans for the future.

The identification of plasmid-borne resistance to an antibiotic of last resort suggests that the final pharmacological barrier holding Gram-negative bacterial infections at bay may soon be breached.

Advances in culturing hepatitis C virus have given hope for a universal cell culture system amenable to primary isolate replication. However, low replication efficiency needs to be overcome. The development of fully susceptible yet immunocompetent in vivo models would aid research towards a prophylactic vaccine.

The Renaissance was a time marked by renewed appreciation of the achievements that came before and the re-ignited desire to uncover new insights into the order of the natural world, a description that is equally apt for the microbiology field of today.

Michele Banks (also known as @artologica) is a US-based painter and collage artist whose works are based on scientific and medical themes, and who has a particular fascination with all things microbial. We caught up with Michele to ask about her art and the inspiration behind it.