Bacterial physiology articles within Nature

Featured

  • News |

    Researchers question the science behind last week's revelation of arsenic-based life.

    • Alla Katsnelson

  • Article |

    CRISPR/Cas is a microbial immune system that is known to protect bacteria from virus infection. These authors show that the Streptococcus thermophilus CRISPR/Cas system can prevent both plasmid carriage and phage infection through cleavage of invading double-stranded DNA.

    • Josiane E. Garneau
    • , Marie-Ève Dupuis
    •  & Sylvain Moineau

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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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