Microbes and humans interact in myriad ways, sharing a long history. Many of the most successful microbes are those that inhabit but do not kill their host. Cheaters lose. Tuberculosis settles into the lungs.

Immune cells known as neutrophils produce reactive oxygen intermediates (ROIs) to combat infection with microbes that can cause diseases such as pneumonia.

In process that is shrouded in mystery, rod-shaped bacteria reproduce by splitting themselves in two. By applying advanced mathematics to laboratory data, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has solved a small but important part of this reproductive puzzle.

Metagenomics is a revolutionary approach to study microbes. Rather than isolating pure cultures, the power of high-throughput sequencing is applied directly to environmental samples to obtain information about the genomes of the prokaryotic cells present in a specific habitat studied.

Cooperation is widespread in the natural world but so too are cheats – mutants that do not contribute to the collective good but simply reap the benefits of others’ cooperative efforts.

“Don’t ever change” isn’t just a romantic platitude. It’s a solid evolutionary strategy. At least if you’re among the creatures that produce scads of genetically identical offspring – like microbes, plants or water fleas. These creatures provide a chance to wonder about the clones raised in near-identical environments that turn out differently than their kin.

Microbes that result in beach closures and health advisories when detected at unsafe levels in the ocean also have been detected in the sand, according to a recent study by a team of Stanford scientists.

MIT has launched a new graduate program in microbiology, integrating departments and disciplines from around the Institute. More than 50 faculty members from 10 MIT departments and divisions will participate in the program.

A typical human mouth teems with as many as 700 different species of microbes. A handful of these have been specifically implicated in promoting gum disease, dental cavities, and bad breath, but for the most part, the make-up of this complex ecosystem and its impact on human health remain largely unexplored.

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have made a significant discovery relating to viral infections in humans.

A new mechanism to attack hard-to-treat fungal infections has been revealed by scientists from the biotech company Anacor Pharmaceuticals Inc., California, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] outstation in Grenoble, France. In the current issue of Science they describe how a new compound kills fungal pathogens by blocking an enzyme crucial for their protein synthesis.

It may sound counterintuitive to use a microbial protein to improve water quality.