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Regulated cell death is a key process in plant and animal development, but does it occur in parasitic protozoa? Jeremy Mottram and colleagues assess the evidence of regulated cell death in these organisms and propose that protozoan cell death should be classified as either necrotic or incidental.
It has recently emerged that environmental factors such as ambient temperature can strongly influence insect immunity and, thus, shape the outcome of host–parasite interactions. Here, Murdock, Thomas and colleagues argue that, to get more accurate insights into vector resistance, we need to incorporate temperature variation into studies.
Predicting the virulence of a particular bacterial strain is a complex task that currently cannot be achieved from genome sequence data alone. In this Opinion article, Massey and colleagues present a framework for the construction of a systems biology-based tool that they think could be used to predict virulence phenotypes fromStaphylococcus aureusgenomic sequences using existing technologies.
In this Opinion article, Hajishengallis and colleagues propose that certain low-abundance microorganisms, termed 'keystone pathogens', can disrupt a normally benign commensal microbiota, leading to a microbial community structure that is associated with the development of disease.
Recent high-throughput sequencing studies have provided a first glimpse of the microbiome associated with late-stage colorectal cancer. In this Opinion article, Tjalsma and colleagues present a driver–passenger model to account for the distinct temporal associations of particular bacteria with the diseased tissue during oncogenesis.
Did the cenancestor have a phospholipid membrane? In this Opinion article, Lombard, López-García and Moreira discuss how recent top-down phylogenomic analyses have provided new information to address this question.
During their life cycle, trypanosomes must overcome conflicting demands to ensure their survival and transmission. In this Opinion article, Matthews and colleagues suggest that infection chronicity and transmissibility result from an interplay between programmes of antigenic variation and development.
Understanding how microorganisms interact with other species in a community is a major goal for microbial ecologists. In this Opinion article, Zengler and Palsson describe how successes from systems biology efforts can be used as a road map for the emerging field of community systems (CoSy) biology.
Some individuals who are infected with both HIV and an opportunistic pathogen develop immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) when CD4+T cell numbers are restored. This reaction may arise from a hyper-responsiveness of innate immune cells to the newly reconstituted T cell help, and may apply to other cases of inflammatory pathology.
