Reviews & Analysis

Co-culture of bacterial cells engineered with quorum-sensing and self-lysis circuits allows coupled oscillatory dynamics and stable states, opening the way to engineered microbial ecosystems with targeted dynamics and extending gene circuits to the ecosystem level.

This Perspective looks at how microbial anabolism and the soil microbial carbon pump control microbial necromass accumulation and stabilization; the ‘entombing effect’.

Nitric oxide synthase has long been associated with control of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. However, new work reveals that instead of directing an antibacterial killing response, nitric oxide is critical for restraining granulocytic inflammation, which can provide a nutrient-rich niche for increased bacterial growth.

Coenzymes serve as the catalytic core in many metabolic reactions, but despite their extensive use and intrinsic chemical reactivity, they are remarkably stable.

Plants respond to microbial attack with a lethal burst of reactive oxygen species. How then, do pathogens successfully invade plants? Unexpectedly, a link between primary metabolism and suppression of plant immunity allows the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae to grow in such a hostile environment.

In this Review Article, Horvath and Barrangou describe the discovery of CRISPR–Cas systems as mechanisms of adaptive immunity in prokaryotes and explore the technological applications that have emerged from studying these molecular machines.

This Review Article discusses the physical, chemical and ecological features of the phycosphere, the microenvironment surrounding individual phytoplankton cells, and its importance during phytoplankton–bacteria interactions in aquatic ecosystems.

Structural analysis of the mycobacterial ESX-5 secretion complex presents an important step towards understanding how the ESX type VII (T7) secretion systems can translocate a multitude of substrates — including virulence factors involved in pathogenesis — across the bacterial cell envelope.

Flaviviruses stimulate cross-reactive immune responses that may reduce or exacerbate manifestations of subsequent flavivirus infection. Recent work demonstrates that cross-reactive T cells protect against Zika in HLA transgenic mice, a key step in the development of safe and effective vaccines.

Structural and functional studies of the archaeum Methanocaldococcus jannaschii Argonaute (MjAgo) reveal a DNA-guided DNA nuclease that is also active without a guide. This unguided activity is suggested to prime MjAgo for its subsequent sequence-specific DNA-silencing role in host defence.

The antimalarial mefloquine has been used in the clinic for decades, yet its mode of action has remained elusive. Now, a study reports that the enantiomer (+)-mefloquine binds to the cytosolic ribosome of the major malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

In this Perspective, Suez and Elinav describe the potential for therapeutic approaches based on the use of metabolites secreted, modulated or degraded by the gut microbiome, and issues that will be critical for their implementation.

This Review Article examines how microorganisms that have key roles in the ocean carbon and nitrogen cycles may respond to anthropogenic changes in the Earth's marine ecosystems.

RIPK3 is a well-known mediator of the necroptosis cell death pathway, which is an important antiviral defence mechanism. In an unexpected twist, RIPK3 has now been shown to also drive neuroprotective inflammation in the central nervous system during West Nile virus infection in a cell-death-independent manner.

It is unclear why pregnant women are at high risk of severe influenza infection. Allogeneic pregnancy in mice is now shown to alter both innate and adaptive responses to influenza virus infection, enabling the emergence of more virulent virus variants.

Bacterial specialized metabolites are bioactive molecules with antibacterial or other activities that are of tremendous clinical use. New work has revealed that transcript elongation is a distinct and widespread point of secondary metabolic gene regulation, which has implications for expanding drug discovery.

This Perspective describes how lessons learned from traditional probiotics will inform the next generation of probiotics and live biotherapeutic products and the microorganisms suitable for development, and the regulatory framework required to do so.

A review of Bacteroides mechanisms for gut colonization and persistence, which may also serve as a framework to understand the biology of other microbiota species.

Attaching and effacing enteropathogenic Escherichia coli causes gastrointestinal inflammation and diarrhoea. In this issue of Nature Microbiology, Pearson and colleagues find that this pathology involves bacterial cleavage of a class of host cell death signal adaptors that encode a unique protein interaction motif called the RHIM.

Rodent malaria parasites establish chronic infections through the sequential expression of subsets of variant antigen-encoding genes, a process that surprisingly appears to be independent of adaptive immunity.