Volume 8 Issue 4, April 2010

Fighting infectious diseases in developing countries is difficult owing to limited financial resources. Many pharmaceutical companies have programmes that provide much needed medicines, but more can be done.

Two recent papers have revealed further details of how RNA viruses engage the host innate immune system.

Extracellular signals trigger the release of apical organelles fromPlasmodium falciparummerozoites during erythrocyte invasion.

The finding that the archaeonIgnicoccus hospitalishas a charged outer membrane has implications for symbiosis and, possibly, for the evolution of eukaryotes.

A link between the cell cycle andSynechococcus elongatuscircadian rhythm is identified.

Marine-sediment bacteria use electrical currents to couple spatially separated biogeochemical processes.

Sublethal concentrations of bactericidal antibiotics can generate multidrug resistance through an increase in the mutation rate that is driven by the formation of reactive oxygen species.

This month's Genome Watch discusses another fascinating example of the latest applications of second-generation sequencing techniques to the study of bacterial populations.

Our monthly round up of infectious diseases news, which this month includes a broad-spectrum antiviral that tackles all enveloped viruses and the latest on the link between XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Antibiotic resistance seriously threatens our ability to treat infectious diseases. The genes conferring resistance can easily move between organisms, resulting in nearly untreatable diseases. Jo Handelsman and colleagues describe how resistance is spread, the origin of the genes conferring this resistance and the roles they may have in their natural environments.

The mutations that confer antibiotic resistance lead, in most cases, to a decrease in fitness. Here, Andersson and Hughes describe the various ways in which bacteria can minimize the fitness cost and how this may be exploited to reverse antibiotic resistance.

Artemisinin is one of the few antimalarials for which there is no widespread resistance. However, malaria parasites with decreased sensitivity have been reported recently. In this Review Arjen Dondorp and colleagues describe the initial detection of artemisinin resistance and discuss several strategies to prevent its spread.

Mupirocin is a polyketide antibiotic produced byPseudomonas fluorescens that is used to control the carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Here, Thomas and colleagues describe the mechanisms underlying the mode of action and biosynthesis of mupirocin and discuss how this understanding could lead to the development of novel antibiotics.

Danielle Garsin looks at the recent progress that has been made in our understanding of ethanolamine utilization, including the evidence linking ethanolamine utilization to pathogenesis in a diverse range of bacterial pathogens.

Harding and Boom review the ability ofMycobacterium tuberculosis to inhibit major histocompatibility complex class II antigen presentation through prolonged stimulation of Toll-like receptor 2. They suggest that this reflects a general mechanism of negative-feedback regulation that prevents excessive T cell-mediated inflammation and that M. tuberculosishas subverted to avoid host immune recognition.

To highlight the problem of resistance to antimicrobials, Nature Reviews Microbiology presents a set of specially commissioned articles that focus on key issues in the field, including the role of antibiotic resistance in nature, how the spread of antimicrobial resistance could be limited and the pharmaceutical strategies that are used to overcome resistance to various classes of antimicrobials. The Focus issue is accompanied by a joint Web Focus with Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.