Volume 2 Issue 8, August 2017

The discovery and genomic characterization of a new group of extreme halophilic methanogens sheds light on the origin of methanogenesis and the evolution of the Haloarchaea.

Co-culture of bacterial cells engineered with quorum-sensing and self-lysis circuits allows coupled oscillatory dynamics and stable states, opening the way to engineered microbial ecosystems with targeted dynamics and extending gene circuits to the ecosystem level.

This Perspective looks at how microbial anabolism and the soil microbial carbon pump control microbial necromass accumulation and stabilization; the ‘entombing effect’.

Covalent attachment of quorum-modulating peptides to surfaces can regulate Staphyloccocus aureus biofilm formation.

When faced with hypoxic conditions, Mycobacterium tuberculosis adapts its metabolism to generate intermediates reserved for re-initiation of peptidoglycan biosynthesis that can be used as soon as it is re-exposed to normoxia.

Co-infection shifts the landscape of Staphylococcus aureus genes required for growth.

Methanonatronarchaeia are a distinct class-level lineage of extremely halophilic methanogens, which lack features of classical methanogenesis and have a high intracellular concentration of potassium, suggesting potassium-based osmoprotection.

This study identifies the proteins critical to fungal cellulosome assembly, characterizing the complex as evolutionarily chimeric — an independently evolved fungal complex co-opted catalytic activities from bacteria coexisting within the gut.

This study explores the mechanism for enhanced respiratory virus replication in airway epithelial cells subject to mesenchymal reprogramming, implicating a role for epigenetic silencing interferon pathways.

Virus attenuation is used to obtain vaccine strains. Here, the rapid evolution of RNA viruses is exploited by engineering their genomes to encode sites that are a mutation away from a stop codon, a clever method to generate attenuated viruses.

Synthetic orthogonal lysis circuits promote stable co-culture of metabolically competitive bacteria.

Mutational analysis of marine microorganisms with streamlined genomes revealed an excess of deleterious radical amino acid substitutions compared to related lineages with larger genomes, suggesting that genetic drift may be important.

Cycloclasticus bacterial symbionts of mussels and sponges that live in deep-sea gas and oil seeps are capable of using short-chain alkanes as their primary energy source, providing further insight into chemosynthetic symbioses.

Disruption of a cysteine protease that localizes to the vacuolar compartment of Toxoplasma gondii shows that autophagy is required for the intracellular survival of the parasite during chronic infection.

Sequence-specific interactions between the Hepatitis B virus pre-genome and the core protein define the nucleocapsid assembly pathway and trigger virus-like particle formation. Cp-RNA contacts may regulate pre-genome organization, facilitating reverse transcription.