News & Comment

We spoke with Gary Nabel about research funding, making the move from academia to industry, transformative innovation to improve global health, and the current state of the infectious disease drug pipeline.

As anti-vaccination movements gain momentum in some regions, World Immunization Week 2017 reminds us that vaccines work and are safe, and that ideological positions contrary to this truth ignore the weight of scientific evidence and deny a long history of lives being saved, endangering many more.

We asked Jill Banfield, a mineralogist-turned-microbiologist, how she became interested in microbial communities, what she thinks about field work, how she manages a multidisciplinary team, and where microbiome studies are headed next.

While deaths from leading infectious diseases have decreased since the millennium, the threat from potential new outbreaks means that complacency is not an option. The global health community is grossly underprepared to meet new epidemic challenges, but signs suggest that improvement is underway.

Following the launch of an initiative at the World Economic Forum to prevent future epidemics, we spoke to the scientist at the helm of this coalition, John-Arne Røttingen, who answered our questions on epidemic preparedness, moving from academia to public health policy, evidence-based decision-making, and more.

CRISPR–Cas is an adaptive immune system found in Bacteria and Archaea that confers sequence-specific protection against invasion by foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR–Cas is also a powerful tool for microbiology education and has been an inspiring model for our students for the past three years.

Encouraging researchers to become activists and engage with the public to combat the rising tide of scientific mistrust is easier said than done. Harder still will be to better enable PhDs to thrive in careers away from science, in the public and private sectors, but doing so could bear substantial fruit in the long-term.

Many species of Archaea, Bacteria and eukaryotes are polyploid in natural populations. The mixture of species with unknown but widely varying ploidy levels compromises marker-gene-based analyses of community structures, population dynamics and microbiomes.

Marine microorganisms inhabit diverse environments and interact over different spatial and temporal scales. To fully understand how these interactions shape genome structures, cellular responses, lifestyles, community ecology and biogeochemical cycles, integration of diverse approaches and data is essential.

As we enter 2017, Nature Microbiology completes its first year as a journal dedicated to publishing work of the highest quality from across the field. And what a year it has been. We take this opportunity to mark up the report card and check on our progress.

Dysbiosis, an imbalance in the microbiota, has been a major organizing concept in microbiome science. Here, we discuss how the balance concept, a holdover from prescientific thought, is irrelevant to — and may even distract from — useful microbiome research.

Time, the master regulator of work–life balance, is a rare commodity. Parenting further depletes its stock, so support systems are needed to help investigators navigate the early stages of parenthood and minimize the impact on scientific advancement and career progression.

The declaration of the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance culminates an unprecedented period of efforts to change the politics of antimicrobials and global health. Now begins the onerous task of translating the new-found political will into real-world action.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals aim to solve the most serious global economic, societal and environmental issues. The microbiology community is in a unique position to help tackle this ambitious agenda for sustainable development.

The threat of antimicrobial resistance causing drug-resistant infections and the escalating health, social and economic consequences are now becoming visible at a global level. Here, we discuss the economic and political considerations for creating a truly global and effective response to antimicrobial resistance.

By removing ambiguity and opacity in how we communicate with authors and by striving for timely and efficient handling of all manuscripts, Nature Microbiology is committed to providing a high-quality experience for all researchers submitting work for consideration, whether selected for publication or not.