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The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a disaster that will affect wildlife in the oceans and on the shores for a long time. But can microorganisms come to the rescue?
The identification of a herbicide-responsive riboswitch that can be used to control motility, allowing bacteria to migrate in the presence of the herbicide atrazine.
Two long-term monitoring studies describe the spread and persistence of the fungal pathogenBatrachochytrium dendrobatidisin Californian frog populations.
Our monthly round up of infectious diseases news, which this month includes new developments in HIV preventative measures, a treatment for Ebola and the identification of tuberculosis in feral wild boar.
Oral biofilms are the paradigm of multispecies biofilms. Paul Kolenbrander and colleagues describe the different steps in the formation of these biofilms, the importance of intercellular cooperation and signalling, and how this can lead to pathogenesis. In all these aspects, the distance between the bacteria is an important factor.
The health of the periodontium, the tissue surrounding the teeth, is a delicate balance between host factors and bacterial stimulation. Richard Darveau discusses the factors that are involved in maintaining a healthy periodontium and how pathogens shift the balance to induce disease.
Chikungunya virus is a re-emerging alphavirus that recently caused an epidemic in countries of the Indian Ocean. At the time, little was known about the biology and pathogenesis of this virus compared with other viruses, but recent multidisciplinary efforts have furthered our understanding of this pathogen and its interaction with the host.
As the emergence of antibiotic resistance has increased, there has been a concurrent decline in the discovery and development of new classes of antibiotics. Fishwick and colleagues explore the possibility that structure-based drug design will plug this hole in the antimicrobial pipeline.
Despite the great promise of bacterial bioreporters in the laboratory, their uptake for commercial use has been limited. In this Review, van der Meer and Belkin describe the current design of bacterial bioreporters and discuss how integrating synthetic microbiology and microengineering will increase bioreporter use in the field.
In this Opinion article, Laurent Philippot and colleagues argue that bacterial taxonomic ranks higher than species, such as the phylum, can show ecological coherence, and they discuss the implications of this coherence for bacterial taxonomy, evolution and ecology.