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Tag: "bacterium" at biology news

Plant-derived vaccines safeguard against deadly plague

...ine for human use. Plague, caused by a rod-shaped bacterium called Yersinia pestis, no longer invokes the "black death" feared throughout history, having been widely tamed since the advent of antibiotics. But a new concern has emerged in recent years with respect to bioterrorism. "There have been discovered...

Outsmarting the smartie bug

...ysaccharide capsule forms a sugary coat around the bacterium and changing the structure of the capsule can help it to fool our immune defence systems ?like a Smartie changing its colour. "The bug has a polysaccharide coat which can take any one of 90 different forms, known as serotypes," said Stephen Bentley,...

Creation of antibiotic in test tube holds promise for better antibiotics

...he process that normally occurs in a strain of the bacterium Lactococcus lactis found naturally in milk. They demonstrated how just one protein (NisC) makes 10 new chemical bonds in a stereochemically defined fashion. Specifically, they showed that NisC is responsible for the formation of five characteristic t...

Researchers discover way to transport environmental arsenic to plant leaves in new clean-up strategy

...agher's team inserted two unrelated genes from the bacterium E. coli called arsC and ECS into Arabidopsis, a model lab plant and small member of the mustard family. This allowed the plants to resist the toxic effects of arsenic and sequester three-fold more arsenic in their shoots than normal plants. Still thi...

Drug-resistant bacteria patterns in intensive care units changing nationally

A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium is becoming more prevalent in many intensive care units, according to an article in the Feb. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is responsible for a variety of infections...

Study indicates dramatic rise in antibiotic-resistant community-acquired staph infections

...xpanding", making it a "remarkable epidemic." The bacterium Staphyloccus aureus (staph) normally resides on skin and in noses, and typically infects tissues through cuts or rashes. Those infections can remain minor, or lead to illnesses ranging from boils or abscesses to necrotizing skin infections, pneumoni...

Evolution mystery: Spider venom and bacteria share same toxin

...pider's venom can kill flesh at the bite site; the bacterium causes various illnesses in farm animals. "Our re...rel-shaped enzyme--is evidence that the spider and bacterium share a relatively recent common ancestor," Cordes said. "Aside from being an example of lateral tra...

Salmonella bacteria use RNA to assess and adjust magnesium levels

... of Medicine in St. Louis have added a gene in the bacterium Salmonella to the short list of genes regulated by a new mechanism known as the riboswitch. The Salmonella riboswitch is the first to sense and respond to a metal ion, substantially expanding the types of molecules that riboswitches can detect to h...

Heat-shock protein vaccine reduces alveolar bone loss

...findings of a study they performed to evaluate the bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis heat-shock protein (HSP) 60 as a vaccine candidate to inhibit multiple bacteria-induced alveolar bone loss.Recombinant P. gingivalis HSP60 was produced and purified from P. gingivalis GroEL gene. Rats were immunized with P. g...

New potential drug target in tuberculosis

... obtained a structural image of a protein that the bacterium needs for survival in human cells. This image reve... its active site would shut down key processes the bacterium needs to survive and replicate. This would be a very effective strategy for a drug." The scientists...

Tiny shock absorbers help bacteria stick around inside the body

...H Zurich in Switzerland have been studying how the bacterium E. coli attaches to mucous membranes in the body. ... away by fluids moving through the human body, the bacterium grips even more tightly, helping it stick around and form an infection, like those seen in the urina...

Purdue creates new low-cost system to detect bacteria

...- the types of substances secreted by a particular bacterium and the distance between individual bacteria in a colony, all contribute to how a colony distorts light. The procedure identifies a bacterial colony by comparing an image of its scatter pattern against a template that contains 120 features described ...

Super-sized cassava plants may help fight hunger in Africa

... University. The researchers used a gene from the bacterium E. coli to genetically modify cassava plants. The plants, which were grown in a greenhouse, produced roots that were an average of 2.6 times larger than those produced by regular cassava plants. "Not only did these plants produce larger roots, but t...

Genes discovered that allow gum disease bacterium to invade arteries

...art disease. Porphyromas gingivalis, an important bacterium that causes gum disease, is also linked to cardiov... Rodrigues. "The knowledge of how this pathogenic bacterium interacts with artery cells is important and may lead to the development of therapeutics and diagnos...

Sandia work launched on space shuttle shows live cells influence growth of nanostructures

... cause disease. Presently the state of the dormant bacterium is not understood. Timmins and Brinker are discussing further experiments to validate the model. Finally, building the cells into a coating with a high enough density might elicit from them a defensive, multi-cellular signal of an unpleasant nature...

Protein clue to tailor-made antibiotics

...licin structure makes its way into an unsuspecting bacterium and blocks a key process that lowers the cell's defences and allows the toxin to enter. Professor Kleanthous said: "Antibiotic resistance is on the increase throughout the world. Understanding how bacteria have evolved to kill each other with prot...

Research highlights how bacteria produce energy

...announce that they have genetically engineered the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to directly ferment glucose sugar to ethanol with a high (86%) yield. This is the first step in a quest to develop bacteria that can breakdown and ferment cellulose biomass directly to ethanol. "Currently ethanol is produced prima...

Recombination protein dynamics observed with single monomer resolution

...cA is a DNA recombination protein found in the gut bacterium E. coli. A human homolog, called Rad51, interacts with many proteins, including BRCA2, whose mutation increases susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancers. A better understanding of how these proteins function could help our understanding of cancer...

Basic work on E. coli identifies two new keys to regulation of bacterial gene expression

...nd RNA polymerase, according to work done with the bacterium E. coli and published today (June 16) in the journal Cell by a team of bacteriologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This fundamental research about a key step in RNA synthesis has important implications for the study of gene expression...

Gut microbes' partnership helps body extract energy from food, store it as fat

...gnotobiotic mice with the polysaccharide-digesting bacterium B. thetaiotaomicron. Another group was colonized with M. smithii, while a third group received both B. thetaiotaomicron and M. smithii. The archaeon's presence dramatically affected gene activity in B. thetaiotaomicron, shifting its appetite to a...

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