bacteria
Fighting the next pandemic: Antibiotic resistance
If a two-year-old child living in poverty in India or Bangladesh gets sick with a common bacterial infection, there is ...
Do you have food allergies? Manipulating the gut microbiome might treat them
As a child, Cathryn Nagler broke out in hives when she ate eggs. She reacted to penicillin. Working in labs ...
What’s happening to viruses, bacteria and mites that exist in our socially-isolated home islands?
We may feel isolated now, in our homes, or apart in parks, or behind plexiglass shields in stores. But we are ...
Space-thriving bacteria hold key to quickly and cheaply producing innovative polio vaccine
[Molecular biologist Mike] Daly has been investigating ways to apply the lessons learned from this bacteria’s unique radiation resistance to ...
Artificial life forms—’with no mother or father’—could change the way we develop vaccines
Every living creature on Earth has parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on—representing an unbroken line of ancestry all the way ...
Why infected patients should be put on multidrug cocktails to head off antibiotic tolerance and resistance
Infectious bacteria that are down but not quite dead yet may be more dangerous than previously thought. Even as one ...
Fighting climate change by reprogramming yeast, bacteria to feast on carbon dioxide
An organism easily adapted to different environments and ready to consume any compound would be a valuable tool ...
‘Every sneeze, kiss, or slap on the back could be part of a larger story’: How the microbiome affects our social lives
Research confirms that who you spend time with is a powerful predictor of the microbes you carry. But these tiny ...
New weapon in the fight against antibiotic resistance: Tricking bacteria ‘into killing themselves’
Sneaky molecular biology tricks bacteria into killing themselves, in place of antibiotics ...
Patient death prompts new rules for fecal transplants: ‘Why weren’t these guidelines already in place?’
In June [2019], after a patient died and another was sickened from a fecal transplant that contained drug-resistant bacteria, the ...
Bacteria inoculate crops against salty soil, potentially bringing unworkable farmland back to life
[S]cientists have used bacteria found in the roots of salt-tolerant plants to successfully inoculate alfalfa plants against overly salty soil ...
Podcast: Could domesticated bacteria help break our dependence on fossil fuels?
Microbes surround us and enhance our lives in almost innumerable ways. These helpful micro-machines catalyze key reactions required to produce ...
Recently discovered Salmonella strain could render some infections ‘simply untreatable’
Scientists at North Carolina State University say they’ve discovered disease-causing Salmonella bacteria in the U.S. that can resist one of ...
Are we fighting diseases wrong? Researcher suggests a better approach is building tolerance to infection
[Researcher Janelle] Ayres was running the experiment to determine what causes genetically identical mice to respond differently to the same ...
Some ‘quite effective’ US Civil War ‘folk’ medicines could lead to modern treatments
With conventional medicines in short supply during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned to plant-based alternatives in desperation. New research ...
Stem cell therapy ‘sold as a miracle cure’ linked to 17 bacterial hospitalizations
Over the past year, at least 17 people have been hospitalized after being injected with products made from umbilical cord ...
Far from sterile: Breast milk ‘teeming’ with bacteria
Until relatively recently, most researchers thought that breast milk was sterile. But it turns out that, like most other body parts ...
Does gum disease causes Alzheimer’s? We are a long way from an answer, researcher says
Do you floss regularly? A study published January 23 in Science Advances — and the news stories that it inspired — might ...
How long can bacteria live? 500-year experiment could provide answers
In the year 2514, some future scientist will arrive at the University of Edinburgh (assuming the university still exists), open ...
CRISPR explained: Everything you need to know
Here’s everything you need to know about the complex and sometimes controversial technology driving the gene-editing revolution. CRISPR evolved as ...
Arguing for and against consciousness in single-celled organisms
A provocative new book by Arthur Reber argues that bacteria are conscious and that the origins of mind are found ...
New therapy could aid battle against drug-resistant bacteria
[T]he first penicillin-resistant pathogen was detected in 1940. Since then, many other antibacterial drugs (both natural and semisynthetic) have been ...
Plague genome offers clues about origins of Black Death pandemic
Yersinia pestis, the subject of [Barbara Bramanti’s] research, is the bacterium responsible for three bubonic plague pandemics over human history ...
We’ve long neglected the human virome—now we need to figure out what all those viruses do
A continuous war is fought on our body surfaces, and we haven’t a clue who’s winning ...
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Not so-sterile brains? Researchers find harmless bacteria living there
In the latest example of bacteria being "literally everywhere," scientists appear to have found evidence of microbes living harmlessly in ...
Why probiotics could actually be bad for you
Millions of Americans take probiotics—live bacteria deemed useful—assuming there can be only positive effects. The truth is that you really ...
