Volume 8 Issue 12, December 2023

Increased heat tolerance in fungi with pathogenic potential due to global warming could bring new fungal diseases.

The spread of vector-borne infectious diseases is driven by a complex array of environmental and social drivers, including climate and land-use changes. Global and regional action is urgently needed to tackle carbon emissions and deforestation to halt future outbreaks.

The unprecedented extent of highly pathogenic avian influenza coincides with intensifying global climate changes that alter host ecology and physiology, and could impact virus evolution and dynamics.

Climate changes can destabilize soil microbial communities, but compound and sequential extreme climate events will magnify the destabilizing effects to other trophic levels — thereby impacting terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.

Critical thresholds are abrupt changes in ecosystems triggered by environmental disturbances, which can be used to assess resilience and vulnerability. Here, we propose how a trait-based approach could be used to harness the predictive power of microbial dynamics to manage ecosystem response to environmental changes.

The Nagoya Protocol was drafted to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the international use of genetic resources, but the lack of unified procedures and unclear definitions relating to microorganisms present considerable hurdles to microbiology research.

Counting the number of viable cells in a culture remains a critical measurement in microbiology, but traditional dilution assays are time- and reagent-consuming. We developed the geometric viability assay that overcomes these limitations by leveraging microbial colony distribution in a cone — a pipette tip — to calculate viability across six orders of magnitude.

This Perspective discusses the prevalence of synergistic metabolic interactions in nature and their impact on microbial communities.

Here the authors review how microbial metabolism could offer greener options for the synthesis and breakdown of plastic monomers and polymers.

On-farm experiments in 54 fields in Switzerland show that inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can promote crop yield, and inoculation success can be predicted using soil microbiome indicators.

Sustainable, gram-scale production of beet red food colourant with engineered Yarrowia lipolytica is described.

Using agar media suspended in pipette tips and a standard camera, the geometric viability assay provides a user-friendly and scalable update to standard colony-forming-unit-count approaches.

DNA analysis of ancient dental calculus samples revealed distinct oral microbial communities, including the archaeon Methanobrevibacter, which was associated with hygiene, diet and health.

Cycling of the sulfur compound DMSOP by dimethylsulfoniopropionate lyase enzymes in the most abundant marine bacteria, algae and fungi is diverse and prevalent in Earth’s oceans and sediments and probably impacts climate-active gas production.

Detection of GBS DNA in the placenta is associated with neonatal unit admission, infant morbidity and, in some cases, sepsis and foetal cytokine storm.

Near-identical downy-mildew-associated microbiomes are recruited by infected Arabidopsis plants in different laboratories and reduce the impact of subsequent infection.

Evaluation of a nanopore-sequencing-based workflow for detection of antimalarial resistance in Ghana demonstrates feasibility where molecular surveillance is needed.

Spatiotemporal transcriptomes during multicellular development of Bacillus subtilis swarms reveal supra-generational cooperation.

A postnatal multiple micronutrient deficiency mouse model reveals shifts in bacterial, fungal and viral components of the gut microbiome with implications for microbiome-encoded intrinsic antibiotic resistance mechanisms.

This Resource defines fungal diversity of Populus trees and associations with climate variables on a continental scale.

An analysis of over 2,000 genomes from Human Microbiome Project metagenomic data led to the identification of several extended- and narrow-spectrum antibiotics against clinical multidrug-resistant pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci.