Microbia

Microbial fuel cell: High yield hydrogen source and wastewater cleaner

Using a new electrically-assisted microbial fuel cell (MFC) that does not require oxygen, Penn State environmental engineers and a scientist at Ion Power Inc. have developed the first process that enables bacteria to coax four times as much hydrogen directly out of biomass than can be generated typically by fermentation alone. Dr. Bruce Logan, the Kappe professor of environmental engineeri...

Microbial forensics: The next great forensic challenge

Deliberately spreading disease among the enemy has been occasionally practiced over hundreds of years. But modern bioterrorism is more chilling than ever because of rapidly expanding knowledge about infectious diseases and biotoxins and their potential to wreak havoc in complex, interdependent societies. The nation is in the process of developing a strong microbial forensic program to attribute a...

DOE JGI launches IMG public online microbial genome data clearinghouse

As the microbial world comes to light through DNA sequencing, the new Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) will deliver valuable information for the benefit of the global research community. "The IMG system is an essential enhancement to the computational toolkit supported by DOE," said Dr. Aristides...

Bacteria recognize antimicrobials, respond with counter-defenses

Many living things, from fruit flies to people, naturally produce disease-fighting chemicals, called antimicrobial peptides, to kill harmful bacteria. In a counter move, some disease-causing bacteria have evolved antimicrobial detectors. The bacteria sense the presence of antimicrobial peptides as a warning signal. This alarm sets off a reaction inside the bacteria to avoid destruction. Un...

Poison + water = hydrogen. New microbial genome shows how

Take a pot of scalding water, remove all the oxygen, mix in a bit of poisonous carbon monoxide, and add a pinch of hydrogen gas. It sounds like a recipe for a witch's brew. It may be, but it is also the preferred environment for a microbe known as In a paper published in the November 27th issue of PLoS Genetics, a research team led by scientis...

Patterns in genome organization may partially explain how microbial cells work

The location of a piece of real estate may be its most important feature to many Realtors, and bioengineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Virginia have reported that the location of genes and other features distributed along the chromosomes of bacteria and simpler organisms also is fundamentally important to how microbial cells operate....

UC San Diego partners with Venter Institute to build marine microbial genomics cyberinfrastructure

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will build a state-of-the-art computational resource and develop software tools to decipher the genetic code of communities of microbial life in the world's oceans. The new resource will help scientists understand how microbes function in their natural ecosystems, enable studies on the effect humans are having on the environmen...

Earth Rx: A microbial biotechnology prescription for global environmental health

Water. Waste. Energy. This trio of problems is among the greatest challenges to the environmental health of society. Water purification alone is becoming more problematic in the world due to our increasingly reliance on contaminated sources, such as polluted rivers, lakes and groundwater. "All of these issues are closely interrelated," says Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for En...

New antimicrobial compound adheres to skin to promote healing

University Georgia researchers have developed an anti-microbial treatment that adheres to the skin without being toxic. The researchers envision a human application for the technology, which they're currently seeking to...

Virginia Bioinformatics Institutes launches microbial database

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have launched a publicly-available microbial database to host a range of microbial genome sequences. The VBI Microbial Database (VMD), which is described in a recent article published in Nucleic Acids Research (Vol.34, D379-D381), contains genome sequence and annotation data for the plant pathogens Phytophthora sojae and...

DOE JGI finishes 100th microbial genome

Microbes, thriving in even the world's most extreme environments, are capable of performing myriad biological functions, learned over the billions of years they have inhabited the planet. Those lessons, and how they can be captured to render clean renewable sources of energy and to repair damaged environments, are among the many secrets encoded in their DNA sequence. On May 23, at the general m...

Different strategies underlie the ecology of microbial invasions

Infectious disease can play a key role in mediating the outcome of competition between rival groups, as seen in the effects of disease-bearing conquistadors in the New World--or, on a much smaller ecological scale, the ability of bacteria to spread their viruses to competing bacteria. In a new study, researchers have compared two different general ways in which bacteria compete with one another,...

Mine runoff continues to provide clues to microbial diversification

Pink slime at the surface of water trickling through an old mine in California is proving to be a treasure for researchers in their quest to learn more about how bacterial communities exist in nature. A letter published in today’s online edition of Nature shows that it is possible to follow what microorganisms are doing in their natural environment by identifying the range of proteins that...