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The International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) has recently altered long-standing phylum names and given no guidance for taxonomy of uncultured or imperfectly cultured archaea and bacteria, disrupting progress towards a universal system of microbial taxonomy. Inclusion of new members into ICSP may help it to keep up to date.
A recent study found that constituents of the gut virome are negatively associated with seroconversion following rotavirus vaccination, possibly explaining the diminished effectiveness of rotavirus vaccines in low- and middle-income countries.
In this Review, Perry, Meirelles and Newman review the growing body of evidence that microbial secondary metabolites can modulate susceptibility to commonly used antibiotics, focusing on the mechanisms and why this phenomenon occurs, and they discuss the implications for the diagnosis of antibiotic resistance and therapeutic strategies.
Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics is one of the key technologies to detect and identify the small molecules produced by the human microbiota and to understand the functional role of these microbial metabolites. In this Review, Dorrestein and colleagues review common forms of untargeted mass spectrometry and the types of data that can be obtained in the context of microbiome analysis.
In this Review, Wadhwa and Berg explore the most common bacterial motility mechanisms and summarize the current understanding of the molecular machines that enable bacteria to swim in aqueous media and move on solid surfaces.
Lipid biomarkers provide insights into the nature and history of the Earth’s microbial life. In this Review, Summons et al. discuss how advances in molecular biology have helped elucidate lipid biomarker origins and afforded robust interpretations of fossil lipids, and explore key examples of how genomics-enabled advances in lipid biomarker science are illuminating the history of microbial life on the Earth.