Reviews & Analysis

Accurately predicting the emergence of antibiotic resistance will be crucial to prolonging the clinical life of new antimicrobial molecules. Here, the authors propose methodological guidelines that should allow researchers to predict the development of resistance to an antibiotic before its therapeutic introduction.

The reduction in the incidence of poliomyelitis has stalled in the past 7 years, and an urgent re-assessment of the polio-eradication and post-eradication campaign strategies is needed. We propose that vaccination programmes are crucially important for the maintenance of high levels of population immunity against polio and should be continued into the foreseeable future.

Owing to their ability to couple ion movement with ATP hydrolysis or synthesis, F-type and V-type ATPases constitute the cornerstone of cellular bioenergetics and are present in all three domains of life. In this Opinion, Eugene Koonin and colleagues use sequence and structural data to develop an evolutionary scenario for these ubiquitous molecular machines.

The evidence suggests that a novel secretion system, which is unlike type I–VI secretion systems, exports proteins across the highly impermeable cell walls of mycobacterium. In this Opinion, Wilbert Bitter and colleagues propose to call this system, in line with the accepted nomenclature, type VII secretion.

Unlike prokaryotes, which do not leave a fossil trail, the patterns of change over evolutionary time of eukaryotic phytoplankton can be derived from microfossils. Here, Paul Falkowski and Matthew Oliver use the fossil record, resource competition theory and the physical principles of ocean dynamics to propose how climate might have affected phytoplankton populations in the past, and make predictions for the future.

Stephen Giovannoni and Ulrich Stingl discuss recent advances in the cultivation of bacterioplankton, and review the new insights into the ecology and physiology of these microorganisms that have been enabled by metagenomic and population studies of cultivated strains.

Microorganisms communicate and cooperate to perform a wide range of multicellular behaviours including biofilm formation. In this Opinion, Kenneth Bayles discusses the role of regulated bacterial cell death and lysis in biofilm development, and how this process is functionally analogous to apoptosis in eukaryotic development.

The discovery of broad structural and functional relationships among host defence effector polypeptides from all biological kingdoms has provided new insights into the immunological roles of these molecules. This Opinion highlights the unifying themes of these host defence molecules by considering their evolutionary past and biomedical future.

Vaccine strategies are focused on developing protective responses to immunogenic peptide epitopes of pathogens that are normally recognized by T and B cells. However, some epitopes stimulate crossreactive T-cell responses between pathogens and can prime a host to damaging pathology on infection with the crossreactive pathogen. The removal of potentially pathogenic epitopes from vaccines might enhance prophylaxis and reduce the risk of side effects of vaccine-associated disease.

The use of pathogen profiles in the management of disease could integrate typing and epidemiological data to enable the early detection of hospital infections and real-time global epidemiological surveillance of pathogens. This article outlines approaches to the translation of pathogen genotyping and microbial genomics into formats that are suitable for communicable disease management, surveillance and control.

Malaria is a global health problem, with a childhood death every 30 seconds from this devastating disease. Although there are effective antimalarial drugs, supply constraints and price limit their use. This Opinion article proposes that fungal biocontrol might provide a cheap, safe and green tool for the control of malaria.

The environmental distribution of the Archaea is distinct from that of the Bacteria, but no single principle provides a satisfactory explanation for their ecological differences. David Valentine proposes a hypothesis to account for the success of the Archaea. He examines archaeal metabolism with respect to ecology and argues that the Archaea are better adapted than the Bacteria to chronic energy stress.

In this Opinion, Burkhard Hense, Jan-Ulrich Kreft and colleagues discuss quorum sensing and diffusion sensing, an alternative explanation for autoinducer signalling, and the problems they feel are associated with each explanation, before going on to propose efficiency sensing as a unifying functional hypothesis.

Focusing on theUstilago maydismodel system, Gero Steinberg discusses recent advances in our understanding of endosome motility in fungal hyphae, speculating on possible roles of endosome motility in cell polarization and retrograde signalling to the nucleus.

During the rapid spread of HIV-1 in humans, the virus has evolved and diversified extensively. In this Opinion article, Eric Arts and colleagues discuss the potential impact of this diversification on viral fitness and spread, and speculate on whether HIV-1 is attenuating.

Biofilm research is a growing discipline within microbiology. Can the theories of landscape ecology be useful for understanding how these microbial communities become established? Here, an interdisciplinary group of authors present the arguments for viewing biofilms as landscapes.