Bacteriology articles from across Nature Portfolio

The type three secretion system (T3SS) is a membrane-anchored nano-machine utilized by many pathogenic bacteria to inject effector proteins and thus take control of host cells. In a recent article, Kaval et al. reveal a striking colocalization of a T3SS-encoding locus, its transcriptional activators, protein products, and the complete structure at the cell membrane, which they claim provides evidence for a mechanism known as ‘transertion’.

Mycobacterium abscessus requires high levels of biotin biosynthesis during infection, because this vitamin enables key adaptations to the alkaline lung airway environment through fatty acid remodelling that increases fluidity of the cell envelope.

This study shows that Listeria monocytogenes and Enterococcus faecalis can evade phage predation by transient conversion to a cell wall-deficient L-form state.

Chemotaxis towards the interspecies quorum sensing signal autoinducer 2 (AI-2) promotes gut colonization by Escherichia coli and is linked to fructoselysine metabolism. The differential ability of E. coli strains to chemotactically respond to AI-2 further leads to niche segregation and co-existence of E. coli strains in the murine gut.

Most prokaryotes cannot easily be grown in the laboratory and distributed as pure cultures. Thus, these organisms could not be officially named. A code of nomenclature — the SeqCode — provides paths to name such organisms on the basis of genomic data, aiming to unify field and laboratory studies in microbiology.

Plant-beneficial pseudomonads use a type IVB secretion system to kill bacterial competitors and invade biofilms, playing a major role in root-associated lifestyle.