Volume 12 Issue 12, December 2014

Two studies report the use of a customizable Cas9 nuclease as an antimicrobial for sequence-specific killing of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Two new studies provide insights into the structural rearrangements and dynamic conformational changes of the HIV-1 spike that facilitate viral entry.

Two new papers look at different ways in whichChlamydia trachomatisinteracts with the host cell cytoskeleton.

Reactive oxygen species induce a 'division of labour' in intracellularCryptococcus gattiipopulations, which promotes pathogenesis.

This month's Genome Watch explores the effect that recombination can have on the interpretation of outbreak investigations, and the far-reaching consequences for genomic diversity in bacterial species.

To understand the network of reactions within the biogeochemical (iron) Fe cycle, it is necessary to determine which abiotic or microbially mediated reactions are dominant under various environmental conditions. Kappler and colleagues review the major biotic and abiotic reactions in the biogeochemical Fe cycle.

Acetogenic bacteria rely on the reduction of CO₂ to acetate by the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway to couple energy conservation and biomass production. However, how energy is conserved in acetogens has been an enigma. Here, Schuchmann and Müller describe recent insights into the biochemistry and genetics of the energy metabolism of model acetogens, highlight how these bacteria link CO₂fixation to energy conservation and propose a new bioenergetic classification for acetogens.

The shift in the receptor-binding specificity of influenza A viruses is mostly determined by mutations in viral haemagglutinin. In this Review, Gao and colleagues discuss recent crystallographic studies that provide molecular insights into haemagglutinin–host receptor interactions that have enabled several influenza A virus subtypes to 'jump' from avian to human hosts.

Recent studies have shown that submicroscopicPlasmodium falciparuminfections are an important, but often undetected, reservoir of malaria and are major contributors to transmission. In this Opinion article, Bousema and colleagues discuss the epidemiology of these infections and the prospects for intervention strategies, and they argue for the wider deployment of molecular diagnostic tools to understand and quantify infection dynamics.

The extensive genome reduction that is observed in bacterial endosymbionts is expected for species with small effective population sizes; however, similar reduction is observed in some free-living marine cyanobacteria that have extremely large effective population sizes. In this Opinion article, the authors discuss the different hypotheses that have been proposed to account for this reductive genome evolution at both ends of the bacterial population size spectrum.