Volume 4 Issue 1, January 2006

To evade the immune system, the meningococcus generates genetic variants and balances this genome instability with genome repair. Tonje Davidsen and Tone Tønjum review the dynamics of the meningococcal genome and contrast its unique DNA-repair profile with that of the model organismEscherichia coli.

The highly virulent paramyxoviruses Hendra and Nipah virus are recent additions to the gamut of emerging human pathogens. Bryan Eaton and colleagues provide an overview of these pathogens and discuss recent progress in the understanding of the molecular basis for henipavirus pathogenicity.

The prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant microorganisms in the community is steadily increasing. Yoko Furuya and Franklin Lowy discuss the unique mixture of factors that contribute to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in the community setting. The complicated nature of antimicrobial resistance requires a multi-pronged combative approach.

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are extensively used in the food and chemical industries. Here, Bas Teusink and Eddy Smid discuss how global metabolic modelling approaches, encompassing metabolic engineering, functional genomics and mathematical analysis, can be applied to optimize the industrial applications of LAB.

Recently, several proteins involved in lipopolysaccharide and Gram-negative bacterial outer-membrane assembly have been identified. Natividad Ruiz, Daniel Kahne and Thomas Silhavy describe these assembly factors and outline the novel experimental approaches that led to their discovery.

Despite markedly different structures, both class I and class II viral membrane-fusion proteins adopt a hairpin conformation, inducing fusion of viral and cellular membranes. This review focuses on the class II proteins, using Semliki Forest virus and tick-borne encephalitis virus fusion proteins as examples.

When Anne Osbourn left her post as a plant biologist to take up a Dream Time Fellowship in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she was charged with the task of bringing science into daily lives and language through creative writing. Surprisingly, Anne turned not to prose, but to poetry. In this essay, she describes her sabbatical from science, which saw her establish the Science, Art and Writing (SAW) concept — an initiative that draws children to science using scientific images as inspiration for creative writing and art.