Scientists have discovered two key proteins that guide one of the two groups of pathogenic bacteria to make their hardy outer shells -- their defense against the world.

Bacteria are particularly harmful to human health when they band together to form a biofilm—a sheet composed of many individual bacteria glued together—because this can allow them to escape from both antibiotics and the immune system of their host.

Viruses and bacterial viruses (known as phages) are among the most abundant life forms on the planet.

Scientists in Japan have discovered a new species of bacteria that can live in hairspray, according to the results of a study published in the March issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Researchers from Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center have found that the bacteria Oxalobacter formigenes (O. formigenes), a naturally occurring bacterium that has no known side effects, is associated with a 70 percent reduction in the risk of recurrent kidney stones. These findings appear online in the March issue Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Biologists examining ecosystems similar to those that existed on Earth more than 3 billion years ago have made a surprising discovery: Viruses that infect bacteria are sometimes parochial and unrelated to their counterparts in other regions of the globe

Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University have examined the complete genomes of viruses that infect the bacteria E. coli, P. aeruginosa and L. lactis and have found that many of these viral genomes exhibit codon bias, the tendency to preferentially encode a protein with a particular spelling.

Every minute, 30,000 of our outermost skin cells die so that we can live. When they do, new cells migrate from the inner layer of the skin to the surface of it, where they form a tough protective barrier.

A Montana State University professor and his colleagues have found evidence suggesting that airborne bacteria are globally distributed in the atmosphere and may play a large role in the cycle of precipitation.

Brent Christner, LSU professor of biological sciences, in partnership with colleagues in Montana and France, recently found evidence that rain-making bacteria are widely distributed in the atmosphere.

Bacteria that cause the bubonic plague avoid death in our bodies by injecting our cells with immune evasion proteins. Scientists have discovered a new way bacteria build and hold the syringes, according to research published in the journal Microbiology.

MIT biologists have provoked soil-dwelling bacteria into producing a new type of antibiotic by pitting them against another strain of bacteria in a battle for survival.