Tag: "bacterial" at biology news

Researchers track how spores break out of dormant state

...apping into the unknown world of awakening dormant bacterial spores, researchers have revealed through atomic f...o gain fundamental insights into the key events in bacterial cell development.” The researchers, including Marco Plomp, lead author at LLNL, and those from Ch...

Crammed with charged DNA, pressure rises inside virus

...ay help phi29 inject its genetic material into the bacterial cells it infects. Now a team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has used laser tweezers to measure the forces exerted by the motor as it pushes the DNA into the capsid. “The virus’ motor has to do mechanical work to...

A new plant-bacterial symbiotic mechanism promising for crop applications

... The researchers sequenced (3) the genes of two bacterial strains of Bradyrhizobium, ORS278 and BTAi1, in order to find out their genetic make-up and identify the genes involved in this rather special form of symbiosis. These bacteria were found to have no nod genes, usually essential for nodulation. Bradyr...

Newly found sensing system enables certain bacteria to resist human immune defenses

...ith the primary difference being the nature of the bacterial cell wall. Little is known about how gram-positive bacteria—such as those that can lead to food poisoning, skin disorders and toxic shock—avoid being killed by AMPs. AMPs are made by virtually all groups of organisms, including amphibians, insects, s...

Microbes at work cleaning up the environment

... researchers conducted experiments guided by known bacterial metal-binding proteins that bind zinc and other potentially toxic metals at cysteine locales. Cysteine is a sulfur-containing amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. The researchers found that inorganic aggregation of zinc-sul...

Staphylococcus aureus hides out in cells

... profile dramatically changed: gene expression for bacterial metabolic functions and transport shut down, putting the bacteria in a dormant state. Simultaneously, production of toxins potentially lethal for the epithelial cells becomes strictly controlled to limit cellular damage. Mechanisms that helped the ba...

Potent possibilities for parasite attack

...asite genes are thought to have been acquired from bacterial species that have very similar sequences. "CFAS... that some virulence factors are conserved between bacterial and eukaryotic intracellular pathogens," said Jeremy Mottram, a collaborator on the project who is a...

Modified mushrooms may yield human drugs

...o hygromycin, an antibiotic, to circular pieces of bacterial DNA called plasmids, which have the ability to multiply within a bacterium known as Agrobacterium. The hygromycin resistance gene is a marker gene to help sort out the transgenic mushroom cells from the non-transgenic cells, Dr. Romaine explain...

How plague-causing bacteria disarm host defense

Effector proteins are the bad guys that help bacterial pathogens do their job of infecting the host by cr...an 200 million people in the Middle Ages. "This bacterial species could still be a threat today," said Navarro, adding that scientists had isolated an antibio...

Early exposure to indoor fungus molecules may protect infants against future allergies

...yzed them for indoor allergens, fungal glucans and bacterial endotoxins. They also gathered information about t...-life exposure to common microbial components—like bacterial endotoxins and fungal glucans—can stimulate the body’s immune system to produce infection- and aller...

Sleepless for science: Flies show link between sleep, immune system in Stanford study

...r gene's function made the flies more sensitive to bacterial infections and these sick flies died significantly faster than control flies, which lived two to four times as long as the sick ones. "We want to know how the internal clock knows the animal is infected, and how does the immune system know that yo...

Researchers develop way to calculate speed of bacterial sex

...elp scientists to quantify the spread of important bacterial traits. The swapping of genetic material between bacteria leads to bacterial adaptation and evolution; however, bacterial adaptation is a double-edged sword for the environment....

Growing nerve cells in 3-D dramatically affects gene expression

...ese cells ?from the proliferation of cancer to the bacterial assault by antibiotics ?may play out differently. Studies indeed show differences in behavior between cells cultured in 2-D and in 3-D. Cells cultured in 3-D, for example, grow faster. Hoffman-Kim, an assistant professor of medical science and eng...

A new portable biosensor detects traces of contaminants in food more quickly and cheaply

...e food chain. Similarly, antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections in domestic animals, such as the case of sulphanilamides in cattle, and even those used to improve growth in farm animals, may contaminate food and be harmful for people. The European Community has established upper limits for the presence...

Natural antibiotics yield secrets to atom-level imaging technique

...onal antibiotics, which typically inhibit specific bacterial proteins, AMPs get downright physical with invader... even more effective in overcoming ever-increasing bacterial resistance. For instance, rearranging parts of the molecule might make it fit into the membrane bett...

Study finds antibiotic resistance in poultry even when antibiotics were not used

... human illness. With these resistance genes, human bacterial illness could become harder to treat. These concerns led the European Union to ban the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in chickens in 2006. In 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of the drug Baytril ?the brand name f...

Mine runoff continues to provide clues to microbial diversification

...researchers in their quest to learn more about how bacterial communities exist in nature. A letter published i... vital role in investigating the complexity of how bacterial consortia cooperate and compete in nature. In fact, ORNL mass spectrometry provided the ability to r...

Scripps research study shows humans and plants share common regulatory pathway

...innate immune system’s recognition and response to bacterial infection and members of the R protein family. "There has been a great deal of speculation that R proteins and Nod1 are related, but our study provides the first direct link between plants and humans," said Richard Ulevitch, the Scripps Research ...

Bacterial walls come tumbling down

...tions initiated by Staphylococcus aureus and other bacterial pathogens. The research team, led by Natalie Stry...hough scientists have spent many years identifying bacterial components whose structural features might have weaknesses that can be exploited by antibiotics, pro...

Sheffield scientists light up bacteria

... detecting infection in battlefield conditions and bacterial contamination, whether accidental or deliberate. Currently identifying bacterial infection takes several days and requires swabbing and culturing of bacterial swabs as well as the u...

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