News & Comment

Following the success of the inaugural games, the Microbial Olympics return with a new series of events and microbial competitors. The games may have moved to a new hosting venue, but the dedication to training, fitness, competition (and yes, education and humour) lives on.

Microbiomes of native peoples could provide constituents to improve our health. Research must be conducted ethically and native peoples appropriately rewarded. However, sharing our medical practice risks spoiling these microbial oases and could lead to the same disease risks that we are trying to prevent.

If the vast potential for microbiome research is to be translated into scientific advances and real world applications, the development of standard operating procedures will be necessary to ensure reproducibility and gain regulatory approval. However, standards should not come at the expense of innovation.

We asked Neil Gow, chair of microbiology at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and president of the Microbiology Society, where his fascination with fungi started, what his life as a mycologist is like, and what the future holds.

There are no antibiotic candidates simply waiting to be brought to market. Overcoming the scientific barriers to innovation will require research and coordination beyond anything that exists in academia, industry or government. We discuss a plan to accelerate the discovery of antibiotics and their transition into the clinic.

Antimicrobials have been one of the biggest success stories in medical history, but the emergence of drug resistance is threatening our ability to successfully treat infections. New approaches, interdisciplinary frameworks and policies have an important role in preventing entry into a post-antimicrobial era.

World Immunization Week 2016 gives us a chance to take stock of the current vaccine landscape, celebrate some notable successes made in recent years and face up to the challenges remaining in closing the gap to ensure that the full benefits of immunization are extended to all infants worldwide.

Integration of multiple ‘omics’ technologies will allow researchers to gain a more complete picture of the constituents and functions of microbial communities and provide far richer information for predictive modelling of community phenotypes.

The Nature Microbiology Community provides a space for researchers to freely share information and discuss ideas. We hope that this initiative encourages greater discourse and engagement with the microbiology research field.

The intestinal microbiota and its interactions with host immunity have been intensely studied in many disease states. This knowledge could ultimately modify clinical management of allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, which is accompanied by dramatic immunological and microbiota perturbations.

Because of their ability to biochemically transform their growing environments, microorganisms are playing a new creative role as a culinary tool, enabling both professional and amateur cooks to create entirely new flavours from existing ingredients.

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?