Volume 1 Issue 7, July 2016

We asked Neil Gow, chair of microbiology at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and president of the Microbiology Society, where his fascination with fungi started, what his life as a mycologist is like, and what the future holds.

Microbiomes of native peoples could provide constituents to improve our health. Research must be conducted ethically and native peoples appropriately rewarded. However, sharing our medical practice risks spoiling these microbial oases and could lead to the same disease risks that we are trying to prevent.

A newly discovered type of bacterial effector produced by the intracellular pathogen Shigella flexneri cooperates with other virulence factors to sabotage host inflammatory responses.

Regulated splicing of some influenza virus RNAs is necessary for the synthesis of various essential proteins. Processing of these transcripts is now found to occur in nuclear speckles, previously considered storage sites for cellular splicing factors.

A combination of metagenomics and stable isotope probing provides new insight into the community-wide degradation of hydrocarbons released during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy is transforming our ability to study the most intimate details of supramolecular multi-protein complexes. The recently observed atomic structure of the T4 phage baseplate paves the way towards understanding the molecular dynamics of other contractile machines such as the bacterial type VI secretion system.

Mice raised under specific pathogen-free conditions in a lab do not model the natural exposure of animals and humans to environmental commensals and pathogens. Now, two studies show that exposing mice to their natural environment, or infecting them with specific pathogens, results in an immune system that better resembles that of adult humans.

Emergence of resistance in eukaryotic microbial pathogens is a major concern. This Review discusses the challenges posed by eukaryotic pathogens, therapies used to target them, emergence of resistance and new approaches to sustaining existing therapies and developing new ones.

High fidelity, ultra-deep sequencing of a modified replicon system revealed >1000-fold differences in mutation rate across the hepatitis C virus genome, with extreme variation even between adjacent nucleotides.

Bacteria enriched from surface and plume waters of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill show that the combined capabilities of community-wide hydrocarbon degradation is greater than its individual components.

Global sampling campaigns show that the CHAB-I-5 Roseobacter cluster is abundant in the marine environment, and found from the poles to the tropics. Analysis of the draft genome of strain SB2 reveals adaptation to an oligotrophic lifestyle.

The translocation assembly module (TAM) of Escherichia coli functions together with the BAM complex to mediate the rapid assembly of usher proteins, the molecular platform important for the biogenesis of bacterial fimbriae.

Whole genome sequencing coupled with assessment of maternal recto–vaginal Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B Streptococcus) colonization, stillbirth and neonatal disease reveals the disease burden and bacterial population structure in coastal Kenya.

Fully replication competent HIV-1 viruses engineered to harbour a foreign epitope tag enabled the unbiased characterization of the cellular interactomes of viral Env and Vif proteins during the natural infection of human lymphocytes.

Influenza virus utilizes splicing factors stored at nuclear speckles through an intranuclear trafficking pathway, which targets viral M1 mRNA to nuclear speckles to promote post-transcriptional splicing and then transports the spliced M2 mRNA from the nucleus.

Strain level analysis of metagenomic data defines the tissue tropism and persistence of human oral Neisseria species.

Shigella flexneri effectors, IpaH1.4 and IpaH2.5, target the E3 linear ubiquitin chain ligase complex (LUBAC) for degradation to inhibit downstream immune signalling during infection.

Genomic analysis of global Babesia microti isolates reveals a population segregated into distinct geographic lineages and identifies variants in drug-binding regions of cytochrome b and ribosomal protein subunit L4 that are associated with relapsing disease.

MicrobeJ is an open-source ImageJ plug-in for the detection and quantitative analysis of bacterial cells.