Peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing research on bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microorganisms, part of the Nature family of journals.
Sickle cell carriers in a Cameroon study caught malaria as often as other children but almost always carried a distinct parasite variety. They were about a tenth as likely to fall ill, pointing to protection that filters which parasites take hold, not only how the host responds.
Reality
Helmholtz Center researchers and collaborators built a 21-species gut community and found plant fiber boosted Segatella copri only when Enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli were also present. The result complicates diet-only accounts of why industrialized and nonindustrialized gut microbiomes differ.
Reality
Pseudomonas aeruginosa cells that reverse after bumping neighbours got 20% of their number out of an EPFL micro-maze, against 1% of mutants that cannot. The work shows touch steering a bacterial crowd on lab surfaces, and spread through tissue or soil was not tested.
Reality
University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
Reality
ISGlobal exposed Plasmodium falciparum to three unrelated stresses, one at a time. Each ran through the same pathway, with the gene-regulating protein AP2-HS switching it on and an RNA brake switching it off.
Reality
Gut phage therapy usually fails because you cannot get enough phage to enough bacteria in time. A team writing in Nature Microbiology built a resident E. coli that makes the phage on site, and it protected mice against an oral Salmonella challenge.
Reality
A Washington State University-led team could not grow these MERS relatives, so it rebuilt their spike proteins and screened aminopeptidase N from about 30 species, finding the human version unusable and the cat, rat and elephant shrew versions open.
Reality
Some bacteria build particles from domesticated virus parts and die to release them, handing pieces of their own genome to relatives. Antibiotic resistance genes can ride along, and a gene cluster controls the switch.
Reality
Emory researchers report in Nature Microbiology that ten days of an approved blood-cancer drug, given as antiretroviral therapy began, left the intact SIV reservoir smaller nine months later. No animal was taken off ART to test rebound.
Reality
Two Monash papers put the standoff between Candida and the macrophage on nutrient terms, and name a common amino acid that kept the immune cell intact in the lab. Read it as target validation.
Reality