Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2017

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.

Rodent malaria parasites establish chronic infections through the sequential expression of subsets of variant antigen-encoding genes, a process that surprisingly appears to be independent of adaptive immunity.

Attaching and effacing enteropathogenic Escherichia coli causes gastrointestinal inflammation and diarrhoea. In this issue of Nature Microbiology, Pearson and colleagues find that this pathology involves bacterial cleavage of a class of host cell death signal adaptors that encode a unique protein interaction motif called the RHIM.

Environmental geomicrobial studies offer insights into the structure and function of the built environment microbiome.

Amalgamation of population genetic theory and models of horizontal gene transfer suggest that pangenomes in prokaryotes result from adaptive, not neutral, evolution.

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli EspL is a cysteine protease that cleaves RHIM-containing proteins and blocks inflammasome signalling during infection.

Community-associated Staphylococcus aureus strains show heightened wall teichoic acid production, which correlates with virulence and abscess formation.

Whole genome sequencing provides a picture of Burkholderia pseudomallei dissemination and evolution.

Mesalamine, the gold-standard ulcerative colitis treatment, rapidly decreases polyphosphate levels in bacterial members of the gut microbiome, sensitizing them towards oxidative stress and reducing colonization and persister cell and biofilm formation.

Myeloperoxidase conversion of H₂O₂ to less-diffusible HOCl limits bystander host damage without comprising antibacterial activity during Salmonella infection.

The ribosomal protein uL23 contacts the signal recognition particle to monitor the translational status of emerging polypeptides.

A survey of sediments from 18 estuaries over 4000 km of coastal China reveals diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes. Analyses of socio-economic factors suggest that the presence of antibiotic resistance genes correlates with human activity.

Isolation and characterization of neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies that recognize the respiratory syncytial virus fusion (F) protein in the pre-fusion conformation, targeting a new antigenic site on the globular head domain of the F protein.

Examination of the structural basis for cross-reactive antibody binding to RSV and HMPV F protein by two related, independently isolated antibodies indicates that both antibodies interact with a conserved surface that could guide the emergence of cross-reactivity.

Epidemiological sampling finds extensive colistin and carbapenem resistance throughout Chinese poultry production-related sites.

Electron cryotomography identifies structures within the Vibrio cholerae toxin-coregulated pilus that are analogous and divergent from type IVa pili.

Screening Cas9 orthologues to improve CRISPR interference in mycobacteria identified four that are broadly functional for targeted gene knockdown, one of which (dCas9_Sth1) achieves a 20–100-fold knockdown of endogenous gene expression with minimal proteotoxicity.

In rodent models, only a minority of infecting Plasmodium parasites, expressing one of several clusters of virulence-associated pir genes, establishes a chronic infection in a manner that is independent of adaptive immunity.