Bacteria articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    During infection, Bacillus anthracis secretes two potent toxins called lethal factor and oedema factor. Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model system, these authors show that these toxins interact with the Rab11/Sec15 exocyst, which is involved in endocytic recycling. This interaction may explain vascular leakage during infection.

    • Annabel Guichard
    • , Shauna M. McGillivray
    •  & Ethan Bier

  • News & Views |

    The bacterium Clostridium difficile can cause life-threatening human disease. The question is which of the organism's two toxins is the more crucial to its pathogenicity. The answer is one or the other, or both. See Letter p.711

    • Jimmy D. Ballard

  • Article |

    Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium causes acute gut inflammation, which promotes the growth of the pathogen through unknown mechanisms. It is now shown that the reactive oxygen species generated during inflammation react with host-derived sulphur compounds to produce tetrathionate, which the pathogen uses as a terminal electron acceptor to support its growth. The ability to use tetrathionate provides the pathogen with a competitive advantage over bacteria that lack this property.

    • Sebastian E. Winter
    • , Parameth Thiennimitr
    •  & Andreas J. Bäumler

  • Editorial |

    Plan to cull badgers in England shows the new government does not respect scientific advice.

  • News & Views |

    Plasmodium falciparum is the agent of the deadliest form of human malaria. A survey of Plasmodium diversity in African apes reveals that western gorillas are the reservoir species for this parasite. See Article p. 420

    • Edward C. Holmes

  • News & Views |

    How does a Salmonella pathogen outcompete beneficial intestinal microorganisms? It triggers an immune response that generates a compound from intestinal gas that it can utilize as an energy source. See Article p. 426

    • Samuel I. Miller

  • Letter |

    Clostridium difficile, an important nosocomial pathogen, produces two toxins. Studies with purified toxins have indicated that only toxin A is important for pathogenesis, but recently it has been suggested that toxin B causes the majority of the disease symptoms in the context of a bacterial infection. These authors demonstrate that both toxins are important for disease and will need to be considered for diagnosis and treatment.

    • Sarah A. Kuehne
    • , Stephen T. Cartman
    •  & Nigel P. Minton

  • Letter |

    Bacteria regularly evolve antibiotic resistance, but little is known about this process at the population level. Here, a continuous culture of Escherichia coli facing increasing antibiotic levels is followed. Most isolates taken from this population are less antibiotic resistant than the population as a whole. A few highly resistant mutants provide protection to the less resistant constituents, in part by producing the signalling molecule indole, which serves to turn on drug efflux pumps and oxidative-stress protective mechanisms.

    • Henry H. Lee
    • , Michael N. Molla
    •  & James J. Collins

  • News & Views |

    A charitable deed by a few cells in a bacterial culture can help the rest of that population survive in the presence of antibiotics. This finding can aid further research into a major problem in public health.

    • Hyun Youk
    •  & Alexander van Oudenaarden

  • Article |

    In bacteria, the lack of compartmentalization within membrane-enclosed compartments has made it difficult to determine how mature messenger RNAs are spatially distributed. Here the authors use fluorescence experiments in bacteria to follow mRNA dispersal after transcription. They find, surprisingly, that the newly transcribed mRNAs show limited diffusion, and speculate that the packed chromosomal material may itself act as a partition to separate translation from mRNA degradation.

    • Paula Montero Llopis
    • , Audrey F. Jackson
    •  & Christine Jacobs-Wagner

  • Letter |

    Staphylococcal superantigens can lead to toxic shock syndrome. They are encoded on pathogenicity islands and with the aid of helper phages can be excised and packaged into highly transmissable phage particles. Here it is shown that a specific, non-essential helper phage protein is responsible for derepression of the pathogenicity island, thereby providing the mechanism for the first step of its mobilization.

    • María Ángeles Tormo-Más
    • , Ignacio Mir
    •  & José R. Penadés

  • Letter |

    The ability of plants to 'green' in the dark is attributed to the activity of the dark-operative protochlorophyllide oxidoreductase (DPOR). This enzyme catalyses the stereospecific reduction of the C17≡C18 double bond of protochlorophyllide to form chlorophyllide a, the direct precursor of chlorophyll a. The X-ray crystal structure of the catalytic component of DPOR has now been solved. A chemical mechanism is proposed by which the reduction of the double bond may occur.

    • Norifumi Muraki
    • , Jiro Nomata
    •  & Yuichi Fujita

  • Letter |

    The bacterium Shigella flexneri, which causes dysentery, infects the gastrointestinal tract. It uses a type III secretion system as a molecular syringe to inject virulence factors into host cells during infection. It is now suggested that varying oxygen availability during different phases of infection tightly regulates expression of the secretion system, as well as the secretion of virulence factors.

    • Benoit Marteyn
    • , Nicholas P. West
    •  & Christoph M. Tang

  • Letter |

    SUMOylation is a post-translational protein modification that affects many eukaryotic cellular processes. It is shown here that cellular infection with Listeria monocytogenes induces degradation of one of the essential SUMOylation enzymes, Ubc9, through a mechanism that involves a bacterial toxin, listeriolysin O. This effect on SUMOylation may support efficient infection by Listeria.

    • David Ribet
    • , Mélanie Hamon
    •  & Pascale Cossart

  • News & Views |

    Proteins are synthesized by ribosomes, and then commonly undergo further modifications. A new example of how these host-cell processes can e subverted by a pathogenic bacterium has come to light.

    • Julian I. Rood

  • Letter |

    It has been thought that ocean temperatures during the early Palaeoarchaean era (around 3.5 billion years ago) were 55–85 °C. But a recent study indicated that the temperatures might be no higher than 40 °C. Here, studies are reported of the oxygen isotope compositions of phosphates in sediments from the 3.2–3.5-billion-year-old Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. The findings indicate a well-developed phosphorus cycle and evolved biological activity in an Archaean ocean with temperatures of 26–35 °C.

    • Ruth E. Blake
    • , Sae Jung Chang
    •  & Aivo Lepland

  • Letter |

    One of the roles of the human gut microbiota is to break down nutrients using bacterial enzymes that are lacking from the human genome. It is now shown that the gut microbiota of Japanese, but not American, individuals contains porphyranases, enzymes that digest sulphated polysaccharides which are present in the marine environment only. These findings indicate that diet can select for gene content of the human microbiota.

    • Jan-Hendrik Hehemann
    • , Gaëlle Correc
    •  & Gurvan Michel

  • Article |

    In certain microbes, the anaerobic oxidation of methane can be linked to the reduction of nitrates and nitrites. Here it is shown that this occurs through the intermediate production of oxygen. This brings the number of known biological pathways for oxygen production to four, with implications for our understanding of life on the early Earth.

    • Katharina F. Ettwig
    • , Margaret K. Butler
    •  & Marc Strous

  • News & Views |

    Microorganisms that grow by oxidizing methane come in two basic types, aerobic and anaerobic. Now we have something in between that generates its own supply of molecular oxygen by metabolizing nitric oxide.

    • Ronald S. Oremland

  • News |

    Atomically thin carbon sheets offer bacteria a protective shell in electron microscopes.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • News |

    Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • Letter |

    UCYN–A is a recently discovered nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium with unusual metabolic features. The complete genome of this uncultivated organism is now presented, revealing a photofermentative metabolism and dependency on other organisms for essential compounds.

    • H. James Tripp
    • , Shellie R. Bench
    •  & Jonathan P. Zehr

  • News & Views |

    By synchronizing clocks, humans make more efficient use of their time and orchestrate their activities in different places. Bacteria have now been engineered that similarly coordinate their molecular timepieces.

    • Martin Fussenegger

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