Reviews & Analysis

In this Review, Rotello and colleagues discuss the mechanisms by which nanomaterials can be used to target antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, highlight design elements and properties of nanomaterials that can be engineered to enhance potency, and explore recent progress and remaining challenges for clinical implementation of nanomaterials as antimicrobial therapeutics.

Newly developed antibacterial nanostructured surfaces show excellent prospects as next-generation biomaterials. In this Review, Ivanova, Stoodley and colleagues explore the different mechanisms by which various surface nanopatterns exert the necessary physico-mechanical forces on the bacterial cell membrane that will ultimately result in cell death.

In this Review, Trivedi and colleagues explore the interactions between plants, their associated microbial communities and the environment, and also discuss how those interactions shape the assembly of plant-associated microbiomes and modulate their beneficial traits.

Advances in imaging techniques have revealed an unexpected abundance and diversity of organelles in bacteria. In this Review, Greening and Lithgow outline the different types of bacterial organelles and discuss common themes in their formation and function.

Mycorrhizas are ubiquitous mutualistic symbioses established between plant roots and soil fungi. In this Review, Bonfante and colleagues explore the origin and evolution of mycorrhizal fungi, the diversity of their interactions with host plants and the potential of application of mycorrhizal symbioses in the development of sustainable agricultural and environmental strategies.

The archaeal community, the archaeome, is now increasingly recognized as an important component of host-associated microbiomes. In this Review, Moissl-Eichinger and colleagues discuss the diversity and potential roles of the archaea associated with protists, plants and animals, highlighting the potential roles of archaea in human health and disease.

The last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent population of organisms from which all cellular life on Earth descends. In this Perspective article, Krupovic, Dolja and Koonin analyse the extant distribution of viruses across the two primary domains of life to infer the LUCA virome.

Borrelia burgdorferi has a complex life cycle with several different hosts, causing Lyme disease when it infects humans. In this Review, Fikrig and colleagues discuss how B. burgdorferi infects and interacts with its tick vector to ensure onward transmission.

During target protection, a resistance protein physically associates with an antibiotic target to rescue the latter from antibiotic-mediated inhibition. In this Review, O’Neill and colleagues describe the different molecular mechanisms underlying target protection and emphasize the importance of this phenomenon as a cause of clinically significant antibiotic resistance.

In this Review, Tsai and Cullen discuss how host epigenetic and epitranscriptomic processes regulate viral gene expression at the levels of chromatin and RNA function, respectively, and explore how viruses modify, avoid or utilize these processes in order to promote their replication or persistence.

In this Review, Rumbaugh and Sauer discuss the environmental cues and microorganism-derived signals that lead to the biofilm dispersal response, recent findings of matrix-degrading enzymes required for cells to liberate themselves from the biofilm matrix, novel insight into the mechanisms and regulation of dispersal, and the implications of these insights for biofilm control efforts.

Bats harbour a large number of different viruses, some of which have spilled over to cause human disease. In this Review, Letko, Munster and colleagues discuss the diversity of bat viruses and the factors that determine the emergence of zoonotic viruses from bats.

Large-scale metagenomic analyses are vastly increasing the rate of discovery of variation within species but they are also leading to scientific and semantic challenges. Bork and colleagues highlight the advances and challenges that are resulting from the use of metagenomic data to study within-species diversity.

Actinobacteria are versatile producers of bioactive natural products. In this Review, van Wezel and colleagues discuss ecological and genomic insights into the mechanisms governing natural product metabolism and how those insights can be translated into approaches for computational and experimental genome mining strategies that yield novel bioactive molecules, in particular antibiotics.

In this Review, Lopatkin and Collins discuss key areas of predictive biology that are of growing interest to microbiology, the challenges associated with the innate complexity of microorganisms and the value of quantitative methods in making microbiology more predictable.

Antibiotic persistence is a threat to effective treatment of bacterial infections. In this Review, Bakkeren, Diard and Hardt discuss the evolutionary forces that have favoured the development of persisters in populations and the consequences for spread of resistance and virulence determinants.

In this Review, Ruff, Greiling and Kriegel discuss the mechanisms through which the microbiota contributes to the predisposition, initiation and perpetuation of immune-mediated diseases, and explore the therapeutic avenues that either target the microbiota, the barrier surfaces or the host immune system to restore tolerance and homeostasis.

In this Review Egan, Errington and Vollmer discuss new insights into the molecular mechanisms of peptidoglycan synthesis, sacculus growth regulation and bacterial morphology, as well as how bacteria achieve robust cell wall growth under different conditions and stresses.

The schooner Tara sailed 140,000 km across the global oceans to sample diverse marine ecosystems and plankton communities. In the Review, members of the Tara Oceans project highlight how resulting data can be used for an integrated understanding of ocean biology.

Filoviruses such as Ebola virus pose a substantial health risk to humans. Advances in genomic technologies have enabled the rapid, large-scale generation of virus sequence data at the location of disease outbreaks and thus the use of reverse functional genomics to swiftly characterize the threat of, and treatment for, filovirus disease.