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In an increasingly globalized world, appropriate investment in the generation and exploitation of knowledge is important for maintaining economic competitiveness. For small economies to grow and prosper, excelling in research and development will be essential.
The exit of intracellular bacteria from host cells is a crucial stage in microbial pathogenesis that is driven by an evolutionary requirement for efficient dissemination to neighbouring cells and transmission to new hosts. In this comprehensive Review, the authors discuss the diverse repertoire of strategies that is used by intracellular pathogens to escape their host cells.
Mutually beneficial relationships between prokaryotes and eukaryotes are possible because of the ability of microorganisms and their hosts to communicate with each other. In this Review, David Hughes and Vanessa Sperandio discuss how inter-kingdom communication can be 'hijacked' by bacterial pathogens, and how hosts can fight back.
Dietary plant polysaccharides are a major energy source for the anaerobic microbiota that inhabit the mammalian large intestine and rumen. Flint and colleagues discuss polysaccharide utilization by gut anaerobes, focusing on two examples, the use of insoluble structural polysaccharides byRuminococcus flavefaciens and the use of starch by Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron.
The complement system is an essential and efficient component of the immune system's antimicrobial machinery, but many pathogens have developed parallel routes of escape. Understanding complement processes and interactions on a molecular level is essential for the development of novel therapies, and this Review provides a comprehensive overview and update of recent developments in this field.
Most viral vaccines protect against disease by generating neutralizing antibodies. This Review examines the problem of eliciting broad HIV-1 neutralization through vaccination by drawing parallels with the successful subunit influenza virus vaccine and with efforts to develop a pandemic influenza vaccine.
For the full potential of microbial genomics to be realized, a complete understanding of the metabolic capacities of microbial life is required. In this Innovation, the authors discuss new system-biology technologies that enable the identification of novel metabolites and their biochemical connections within metabolic networks.
Filamentation has been implicated in bacterial survival of exposure to environmental stresses, but in this Opinion, Sheryl S. Justice and colleagues propose that the morphological plasticity of pathogenic bacteria is a direct and adaptive response to the sensing of environmental changes.
