Volume 9 Issue 2, February 2024

Training and funding for mentoring, together with metrics to measure success, can ensure this vital practice is beneficial for all mentees, at all stages of their career, argues Michal Elovitz.

Philip Poole narrates his career story and his motivations for studying rhizobia, the agriculturally important bacterial plant symbiont responsible for fixing nitrogen.

Sensing of brain glucose by the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans alters lipid metabolism and membrane composition in the fungus, rendering it drug tolerant.

Metabolomics and feeding experiments demonstrate the host’s active role in sharing organic acids with a gut microbiota member, revealing host–microbe interactions that foster symbiosis.

Cases of Buruli ulcer in southeastern Australia have increased over the past 10 years. Native possums are a reservoir for Mycobacterium ulcerans (the cause of Buruli ulcer), but the route of transmission to humans is unclear. Our findings identify mosquitoes as the vector of M. ulcerans from possums to humans.

This Perspective discusses how viral infections can change inflammation and bone metabolism, leading to diseases.

microbeMASST is a tool to associate known and unknown metabolites to microbial producers leveraging untargeted metabolomics data.

Brain glucose induces in vivo tolerance of Cryptococcus neoformans to amphotericin B, limiting fungicidal efficacy against meningitis in a mouse model, and aureobasidin A inhibits brain glucose-induced tolerance, improving therapeutic outcome.

The gut virome is altered in a mouse model of chronic stress and is associated with changes in behavioural and immune response, which can be restored using faecal virome transfer.

Genomic evidence reveals that Mycobacterium ulcerans recovered from Aedes notoscriptus mosquitoes are genetically identical to bacteria from possums and humans, implicating mosquitoes as a vector for Buruli’s ulcer transmission in southeastern Australia.

A specialized subpopulation of Yersinia entomophaga cells uses a RoeA-regulated, temperature- and pH-dependent type 10 secretion system to mediate lytic Tc toxin release.

Tc toxins of Yersinia entomophaga are assembled only in a subpopulation of cells, followed by a suicide mechanism that results in the release of the toxins.

A trait-based approach harnesses the vast amount of microbial genomic data and enables integration with biogeochemical models, predicting soil microbial ecology and physiology without the need for cultures.

The gut commensal Christensenalla minuta produces a previously undescribed class of secondary bile acids that counteract features of metabolic disease and are depleted in patients with type 2 diabetes.

SARS-CoV-2 adaptation and evolution led to stronger innate immune suppression by increasing expression of Orf6 in Omicron subvariants.

Enrichments from bioreactors find a single bacterium capable of methane oxidation coupled to nitrate reduction via nitrite to dinitrogen, a process previously thought to rely on syntrophy.

Comparative metabolomics and NanoSIMs reveal that the honey bee symbiont Snodgrassella alvi uses host-derived metabolites to colonize the gut, indicating adaptation to a specific metabolic niche in its host.

A field investigation at a former nuclear waste disposal site shows how environmental stress modulates subsurface microbial community assembly.

Characterization of quorum sensing-regulated antibiotic production by Streptococcus salivarus and signal eavesdropping by Streptococcus pyogenes enables engineering of a probiotic strain to prevent pathogen signal eavesdropping and antibiotic degradation, and inhibit colonization.

Prokaryotic RNA viruses recovered from hot springs in Japan using fragmented and primer-ligated dsRNA sequencing form divergent clades in the Riboviria branch of RNA viruses.

Isotope tracing, kinetics and transcriptomics show how members of the four AOM lineages employ different nitrogen use strategies that minimize competition for nitrogen substrates.

Ocean viral proteome annotations are expanded by a machine learning approach that is not reliant on sequence homology and can annotate sequences not homologous to those seen in training.

Automated and scalable designation of virus lineages based on a heuristic approach can help to determine and curate virus lineages from large genomic datasets and inform nomenclature.

High-throughput bacterial transcriptomics of 409 drug–microorganism interactions reveals mechanistic insights into drug-mediated microbiota shifts.