Articles in 2017

Bacterial biofilms fabricate an extracellular amyloid fibre network that intimately links cells together and inhibits the ability of bacteriophages to penetrate the biofilm.

The development of tools to accelerate identification of causal microorganisms is crucial, and advances in microbial culture, bioinformatics and animal experimentation are currently driving these discoveries.

The mechanisms involved in controlling Candida albicans at mucosal sites are not fully understood. Recent work identifies the EphA2 on epithelial cells as a fungal β-glucan receptor that is critical for mediating protective immunity during oral candidiasis.

Despite regular claims to the contrary, our peer review systems are not fundamentally broken, but they do suffer from stresses and strains that require journals to undertake ongoing maintenance, by trialling and adopting new practices while ensuring continued rigor.

This Perspective debates the concept of enterotypes and their use to characterize the gut microbiome, and provides a classifier and standardized methodology to aid cross-study comparisons.

Using a soft-lithography method that enables single-cell analysis of Halobacterium salinarum, this study shows that archaeal cells achieve homogeneity in cell size by growing a constant size between two cell cycle events (that is, the adder model).

This study describes the dynamic mechanisms driving utilization of pectins by Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, where specific polysaccharide-utilization loci target specific pectin molecules with the products available for use by other bacteria.

The four PASTA domains of StkP, a critical regulator of cell division in Streptococcus pneumoniae, play distinct roles in controlling septal cell wall thickness and cell separation.

Multiantennal glycan receptors associated with in vivo tropism of Salmonella Typhi typhoid toxin.

Vibrio cholerae quorum sensing mitigates infection-induced wasting of a Drosophila host.

Inoculation of pregnant dams with an antibiotic-perturbed microbiota resulted in vertical transmission to the offspring in the absence of antibiotics and increased colitis in IL10^–/– mice, indicating that antibiotic treatment has long-term effects.

The incorporation of additional gene circuits into hosts can often lead to unpredicted and undesirable behaviours. Recent work has developed a modelling framework that accounts for host–circuit interactions and can predict a variety of phenotypes at both single-cell and population levels.

Increasing research on microbial communities has resulted in massive amounts of data being generated and shared, yet data accessibility, accuracy and thoroughness remain problematic and can be a substantial obstacle for scientists looking to explore existing datasets.

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Richard Henderson and Joachim Frank for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, a technique for high-resolution structural determination of biomolecules in solution that has provided unprecedented insight into the biology of microorganisms.

The use of levulinic acid in bioconversion strategies has been limited by the lack of information on the pathways used by microorganisms to degrade it. Now, functional genomics reveals the essential steps for utilization of levulinic acid in Pseudomonas putida.

Recent work finds that reactive oxygen species are generated in cells starved for the nucleobase thymine and contribute to DNA-destructive “thymineless death” mechanisms, which underlie the activities of many drugs, including trimethoprim and sulfa-based antibiotics. Such mechanisms may also apply to cells across the tree of life.