Volume 7 Issue 11, November 2022

Combining simultaneous host and pathogen metagenomic profiles in a cohort of hospitalized and critically ill patients allows for more accurate diagnosis of sepsis.

Pandemic viruses cause major global disease burden and economic disruption. We investigated pandemic HIV-1(M) to understand its unique characteristics by comparing it with HIV strains that did not achieve pandemic human-to-human spread. We observed structural adaptations in the HIV-1(M) capsid that reduce detection by innate immune sensors.

Efforts to futureproof global microbial biodiversity are proposed, in particular in managed landscapes, to monitor, manage and restore the soil fungal microbiome.

Careful and responsible microbiome management is a critical strategy to counter biodiversity loss, but practical and regulatory hurdles must be addressed to maximize its utility.

In this Perspective, the authors discuss the importance and current challenges of using genomic data to predict the emergence of infectious disease outbreaks, and propose the next steps to integrate genomics and modelling for infectious diseases forecasting.

The authors review archaeal morphology, surface features, internal organization and cell division, discussing the state of the art and future research directions.

Comprenhensive analysis of human antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 variants and animal sarbecoviruses finds that Omicron escapes neutralization more readily than distantly related animal sarbecoviruses.

Innate immune evasion is key to evolution of the pandemic lineage of HIV.

In apicomplexan parasites, the conoid is a dynamic organelle of enigmatic function. This study establishes that the conoid movement is essential to control the flux of F-actin needed for myosin-dependent motility that powers invasion and egress.

Longitudinal population deep sequencing of Streptococcus pneumoniae sampled from infants and their mothers improves our understanding of the dynamics of colonization, transmission, inter-strain competition and the impact of antibiotic treatment.

Combined host transcriptional profiling and metagenomic pathogen detection of whole blood and plasma samples from critically ill patients enables the generation of classifiers for reliable prediction of sepsis.

Characterization of bacterial auxin degradation loci and their regulators reveals two distinct types across plant microbiome species, where only one, exemplified in Variovorax species, can interfere with root growth inhibition in a complex synthetic microbial community.

Production of the enterotoxin tilimycin by gut-resident Klebsiella species can alter gut microbiota composition, induce mutational evolution and drive the emergence of antibiotic resistance in mice.

The SIR2-domain-containing protein DSR2 from Bacillus subtilis protects against SPR phage infection via NAD⁺ depletion. Some phages express anti-DSR2 proteins, blocking bacterial immunity.

Short pAgo proteins associate with the Sir2 effector from Geobacter sulfurreducens to induce abortive infection via NAD+ depletion and provide defence against invading DNA.

Type IV CRISPR systems that interfere with the transmission of mobile genetic elements are poorly understood. Here the authors show that a Pseudomonas Type IV-A system targets DNA in a PAM-dependent manner without DNA nuclease activity.

Chimeric particles are formed when influenza A virus and respiratory syncytial virus coinfect lung cells in vitro.

A CRISPR-based oligo recombineering (CORe) approach functionally prioritizes electrophile-sensitive cysteines in Toxoplasma gondii and promotes anti-parasitic drug discovery.

This Article reports the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 escape mutations during bamlanivimab therapy in the setting of a phase II clinical trial.

An atlas of Bacillus subtilis transcription terminators reveals Rho-stimulated intrinsic termination.

A systematic phylogenomic survey finds that growth temperature is a good quantitative predictor of nucleoid-associated protein abundance.