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As the emergence of antibiotic resistance has increased, there has been a concurrent decline in the discovery and development of new classes of antibiotics. Fishwick and colleagues explore the possibility that structure-based drug design will plug this hole in the antimicrobial pipeline.
Demand for renewable alternatives to petrochemical-based products is increasing. In this Review, Bernd Rehm describes how a better understanding ofin vivobacterial biopolymer biosynthesis is enabling the production of tailor-made renewable biopolymers with a diverse range of material properties.
In this Opinion article, Laurent Philippot and colleagues argue that bacterial taxonomic ranks higher than species, such as the phylum, can show ecological coherence, and they discuss the implications of this coherence for bacterial taxonomy, evolution and ecology.
Oral biofilms are the paradigm of multispecies biofilms. Paul Kolenbrander and colleagues describe the different steps in the formation of these biofilms, the importance of intercellular cooperation and signalling, and how this can lead to pathogenesis. In all these aspects, the distance between the bacteria is an important factor.
Fe–S proteins participate in a wide array of cellular processes, from metabolism to gene regulation and DNA replication. Here, Py and Barras discuss the basic requirements for a bacterial cell to build and insert Fe–S clusters into apoproteins and summarize our current knowledge and understanding of this processin vivo.
In this Progress article, the authors discuss recent advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms used by bacteria to evade complement activation, usingStaphylococcus aureus and Neisseria meningitidisas examples of bacteria that avoid complement using mainly secreted and surface-exposed proteins, respectively.
The health of the periodontium, the tissue surrounding the teeth, is a delicate balance between host factors and bacterial stimulation. Richard Darveau discusses the factors that are involved in maintaining a healthy periodontium and how pathogens shift the balance to induce disease.
Despite the great promise of bacterial bioreporters in the laboratory, their uptake for commercial use has been limited. In this Review, van der Meer and Belkin describe the current design of bacterial bioreporters and discuss how integrating synthetic microbiology and microengineering will increase bioreporter use in the field.
With new technologies enabling researchers to get a better picture of microbial metabolismin vivo, Werner Goebel and colleagues describe our current understanding of the major carbon sources and metabolic pathways used by intracellular bacterial pathogens.
To date, three different autotrophic carbon fixation mechanisms have been found in archaea. Here, Georg Fuchs and colleagues describe these mechanisms and their phylogenetic distribution. As most cultivated autotrophic archaea live in conditions that resemble the conditions of early life, these pathways can serve as models for an ancestral autotrophic carbon fixation pathway.
Bacterial responses to antibiotics are complex and involve many genetic and biochemical pathways. This Review describes the effects of bactericidal antibiotics on bacterial cellular processes, the associated responses that contribute to killing and recent insights into these processes revealed through the study of biological networks.
In addition to being a major worldwide contributor to diarrhoeal disease,Giardia intestinalisis a useful model system for studying basic eukaryotic cellular processes owing to its reduced complexity. Here, Svärd and colleagues review the recent advances in our understanding of giardial cell biology and pathogenesis.
Dendritic cells form an important arm of the innate immune defence and provide protection against various pathogens. Heidi Barth and colleagues provide an overview of the interaction of dendritic cells with hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus and HIV.
Diseases spread across the world more than ever. Sarah Randolph and David Rogers use six examples of diseases to explore the factors that are involved in the spread and establishment of diseases and discuss how this information can be used to predict where new infections can take hold and become established.
Anaplasma phagocytophilumandEhrlichia chaffeensiscause the emerging zoonoses human granulocytic anaplasmosis and human monocytic ehrlichiosis, respectively, which are among the most prevalent life-threatening tick-borne zoonoses in the United States. Yasuko Rikihisa reviews the adaptations of these obligate intracellular bacteria that allow them to subvert and manipulate host cells.
Danielle Garsin looks at the recent progress that has been made in our understanding of ethanolamine utilization, including the evidence linking ethanolamine utilization to pathogenesis in a diverse range of bacterial pathogens.
Harding and Boom review the ability ofMycobacterium tuberculosis to inhibit major histocompatibility complex class II antigen presentation through prolonged stimulation of Toll-like receptor 2. They suggest that this reflects a general mechanism of negative-feedback regulation that prevents excessive T cell-mediated inflammation and that M. tuberculosishas subverted to avoid host immune recognition.
The human body plays host to interactions between a diverse range of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi. In this Review, Mylonakis and colleagues describe the characteristics of medically important bacterial–fungal interactions and highlight how imbalances in these interactions can contribute to human disease.
To prevent infection by phages, bacteria have evolved a diverse range of resistance mechanisms. Moineau and colleagues highlight recent work to characterize these resistance strategies and discuss how phages have adapted to overcome many of these mechanisms, triggering an evolutionary arms race with their hosts.
The mutations that confer antibiotic resistance lead, in most cases, to a decrease in fitness. Here, Andersson and Hughes describe the various ways in which bacteria can minimize the fitness cost and how this may be exploited to reverse antibiotic resistance.
