Microbes in Biological News

Marine microbes creating green waves in industry

New technology designed to analyse large numbers of novel marine microbes could lead to more efficient and greener ways to manufacture new drugs for conditions such as epilepsy, diabetes, flu and other viruses, as well as improving the manufacture of other products such as agrochemicals. Resear...

Methane-eating microbes can use iron and manganese oxides to 'breathe'

Iron and manganese compounds, in addition to sulfate, may play an important role in converting methane to carbon dioxide and eventually carbonates in the Earth's oceans, according to a team of researchers looking at anaerobic sediments. These same compounds may have been key to methane reduction i...

Antibiotics take toll on beneficial microbes in gut

ANN ARBOR, Mich. It's common knowledge that a protective navy of bacteria normally floats in our intestinal tracts. Antibiotics at least temporarily disturb the normal balance. But it's unclear which antibiotics are the most disruptive, and if the full array of "good bacteria" return promptly or ...

Understanding extinct microbes may influence the state of modern human health

The study of ancient microbes may not seem consequential, but such pioneering research at the University of Oklahoma has implications for the state of modern human health. Cecil Lewis, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, says results of this research raise questions about the mi...

Study helps clarify role of soil microbes in global warming

Athens, Ga. Current models of global climate change predict warmer temperatures will increase the rate that bacteria and other microbes decompose soil organic matter, a scenario that pumps even more heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. But a new study led by a University of Georgia researche...

Biosolids microbes pose manageable risk to workers

MADISON, WI, OCTOBER 27, 2008Class B biosolids are sewage sludges that have been treated to contain fewer than 2.0 x 106 fecal coliforms/dry gram. The USEPA estimates that 6.3 million tonnes of Class B biosolids are generated in the United States each year, and that by 2010, the amount generated p...

NSF approves $1.3M for OSU and OU microbes hunt

The National Science Foundation has approved a $1.3 million grant for researchers at Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma to discover new kinds of microorganisms in natural habitats. The five-year grant will enable scientists to detect, identify, and isolate unique microorganis...

Analysis of Lake Washington microbes shows the power of metagenomic approaches

WALNUT CREEK, CAToday's powerful sequencing machines can rapidly read the genomes of entire communities of microbes, but the challenge is to extract meaningful information from the jumbled reams of data. In a paper appearing in Nature Biotechnology August 17, a collaboration headed by researcher...

Manufactured Buckyballs don't harm microbes that clean the environment

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Even large amounts of manufactured nanoparticles, also known as Buckyballs, don't faze microscopic organisms that are charged with cleaning up the environment, according to Purdue University researchers. In the first published study to examine Buckyball toxicity on micro...

Coral reefs and climate change: Microbes could be the key to coral death

Coral reefs could be dying out because of changes to the microbes that live in them just as much as from the direct rise in temperature caused by global warming, according to scientists speaking today (Wednesday 2 April 2008) at the Society for General Microbiologys 162nd meeting being held this w...

Unexplored microbes hold incredible potential for science and industry

Humans live in the midst of a seething, breathing microbial world. Microorganisms populate every conceivable habitat, both familiar and exotic, from the surface of the human skin, to rainforest floors, to hydrothermal vents in the ocean floors. Despite the powerful and pervasive role of microb...

Hot springs microbes hold key to dating sedimentary rocks, researchers say

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Scientists studying microbial communities and the growth of sedimentary rock at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park have made a surprising discovery about the geological record of life and the environment. Their discovery could affect how certain sequences of sedimen...

Paired microbes eliminate methane using sulfur pathway

Anaerobic microbes in the Earth's oceans consume 90 percent of the methane produced by methane hydrates methane trapped in ice preventing large amounts of methane from reaching the atmosphere. Researchers now have evidence that the two microbes that accomplish this feat do not simply reverse the...

Cosmopolitan microbes -- hitchhikers on Darwin's dust

Scientists have analysed aerial dust samples collected by Charles Darwin and confirmed that microbes can travel across continents without the need for planes or trains - rather bacteria and fungi hitch-hike by attaching to dust particles. In a paper published in Environmental Microbiology, Dr. ...

Hungry microbes share out the carbon in the roots of plants

Sugars made by plants are rapidly used by microbes living in their roots, according to new research at the University of York, creating a short cut in the carbon cycle that is vital to life on earth. The green leaves of plants use the energy of sunlight to make sugar by combining water with car...

Special issue of BMC Microbiology spotlights standardized language for describing microbes

Blacksburg, Va. -- A special issue of BMC Microbiology highlights some of the recent achievements of scientists developing a universal language to describe the genes involved in the complex interplay between microbes and the hosts that they colonize. Eight papers from members of the internationa...

Evolution in action: Our antibodies take 'evolutionary leaps' to fight microbes

With cold and flu season in full swing, the fact that viruses and bacteria rapidly evolve is apparent with every sneeze, sniffle, and cough. A new report in the January 2009 issue of The FASEB Journal ( http://www.fasebj.org ), explains for the first time how humans keep up with microbes by rear...

New Systems Biology Awards enable detailed study of microbes

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will award five-year contracts estimated to be up to $68.7 million to establish programs in Systems Biology for Infectious Disease Research at four research institutions. Scientists ...

MSU researcher uses grant to study little-known but largely useful microbes

BOZEMAN Montana State University microbiologist Matthew Fields spends his days studying a microscopic world that most people take for granted. Fields studies the physiology and behavior of microbes the tiny organisms that have inhabited virtually every square inch of the earth's surface for t...

New window opens on the secret life of microbes

Nowhere is the principle of "strength in numbers" more apparent than in the collective power of microbes: despite their simplicity, these one-cell organisms -- which number about 5 million trillion trillion strong (no, that is not a typo) on Earth -- affect virtually every ecological process, from...

Nitrous oxide from ocean microbes

A large amount of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is produced by bacteria in the oxygen poor parts of the ocean using nitrites, Dr Mark Trimmer told journalists at a Science Media Centre press briefing today. Dr Trimmer looked at nitrous oxide production in the Arabian Sea, which accounts for ...

Scientists melt million-year-old ice in search of ancient microbes

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. The scientists will now e...

'Hidden-hero' microbes in soil, water may help naturally clean toxic sites

Buried under 243 acres in an East Tennessee valley adjacent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Y-12 National Security Complex, toxic waste from weapons manufacturing at the facility between 1951 and 1983 leaches into groundwater that extends in radioactive plumes for miles from the contaminated...

Report focuses on the role good microbes play in future medicine

Not all bacteria are bad. In fact, beneficial microbes could represent the future of medicine, with the potential to treat a variety of diseases in humans and animals from diarrhea and eczema to gum disease and autoimmune disorders, according to a report released by the American Academy of Microbi...

EGF receptor activation prevents microbes from going more than skin deep

Our skin not only serves as a physical barrier against infection but skin cells themselves can mount an immune response to kill invading microbes by producing antimicrobial polypeptides (AMPs). As overt infection in the skin is a rare event, researchers have theorized that AMPs must not only help...

Understanding the oceans microbes is key to the Earth's future

Life on Earth may owe its existence to tiny microorganisms living in the oceans, but the effect of human-induced change on the vital services these microbes perform for the planet remains largely unstudied, says a report released today by the American Academy of Microbiology, entitled Marine Microb...

Freeze-dried mats of microbes awaken in Antarctic streambed

An experiment in a dry Antarctic stream channel has shown that a carpet of freeze-dried microbes that lay dormant for two decades sprang to life one day after water was diverted into it, said a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher. The results showed the resilience of life in the harsh ...

Researchers Discover That Microbes Can Produce Miniature Electrical Wires

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a tiny biological structure that is highly electrically conductive. This breakthrough helps describe how microorganisms can clean up groundwater and produce electricity from renewable resources. It may also have applications in ...

Proteomics brings researchers closer to understanding microbes that produce acid mine drainage

A pink, bacterial scum on the floor of an abandoned mine seems an unlikely place to study community development, but a biological breakthrough is allowing University of California, Berkeley, researchers to probe the give and take in this microbial mat. Last year, the UC Berkeley team joined with...

Could microbes solve Russia's chemical weapons conundrum?

One of nature's most versatile microorganisms ?a bacterium called Pseudomonas putida ?could help mop up the toxic by-products caused by the destruction of the chemical weapon mustard, write Russian researchers in Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jc...

Leprosy microbes lead scientists to immune discovery

With the unusual opportunity that human leprosy infections provide for study of human immune responses, scientists have discovered how the body's early warning system prompts a rapid immune response by two separate armies of defensive cells. The finding helps explain why, when threatened by microbe...

Yellowstone microbes fueled by hydrogen, according to U. of Colorado study

Microbes living in the brilliantly colored hot springs of Yellowstone National Park use primarily hydrogen for fuel, a discovery University of Colorado at Boulder researchers say bodes well for life in extreme environments on other planets and could add to understanding of bacteria inside the human...

Microbes and their hosts -- exploring the complexity of symbiosis in DNA and cell biology

... can affect the host responses to a wide variety of different bacteria." The term "symbiont plasticity" describes the mechanisms by which symbiotic microbes adapt to changes in host development, immune responses, and the changing external environment. Jennifer Wernegreen, PhD, from the Marine Biological La...

Life on Earth came from other planets

...g nebular cloud. When threatened with death, microbes form spores, and can remain dormant for hundreds o... Numerous published studies have proven that microbes can easily survive an interplanetary journey. Many...onfined to Earth and the conditions of this world. microbes are preadapted for traveling through space and the...

Reveal the enemy

...ce of salmonella, the aptamers fit closely against the walls of the carbon nanotubes. If the biosensor is put into a salmonella-containing sample, the microbes stick to the aptamers like flies to flypaper. This influences the interaction between the aptamers and the nanotubes, which makes a change in the elec...

Reviews of microbial gene language published in special issue of Trends in Microbiology

...ll are types of intimate interactions, and because microbes initiating these different types have common needs...Gene Ontology terms to assist in understanding how microbes interact with their hosts. The authors also point ...complex relationships between human health and the microbes that inhabit us. Here at the Institute for Genome...

Exploring standards to advance microbial genomics

... WALNUT CREEK, CA -- microbes contribute to manifold human endeavors ranging from bioenergy to agriculture to medicine. Moreover, they make the Earth's biogeochemical cycles go rou...

New theory gives more precise estimates of large-scale biodiversity

... mastered this art, profiling the U.S. population by sampling small representative subsets. When biologists try to profile specific animals, plants or microbes of the Amazon, however, the estimates based on a small number of meter- or acre-size plots can vary by a factor of 10. Ecological estimates of the ...

Landmark project to map genomics of complex ant systems

...an process 15 percent of the leaves within a dense rain forest. An array of microbes have co-evolved along with the ants and the fungi including fungal pathogens that attack the ants' crops, and other microbes that benefit the ants and their crops. As a recipient of the highly com...

Faster, more cost-effective DNA test for crime scenes, disease diagnosis

...pect. Biologists can produce multiple copies of individual genes to study gene function, evolution, and other topics. Doctors can amplify the DNA from microbes in a patient's blood to diagnose an infection. Current PCR methods, however, are too expensive and cumbersome for wide use. The scientists desc...