Articles tagged Microbes
(15 results)

When female Anopheles mosquitoes take a blood meal from someone with malaria, a tiny Plasmodium parasite enters the mosquito’s digestive tract. That parasite can invade the mosquito’s salivary tissues, so when the insect takes another blood meal, the intruder can slip into the next human host and start a new malaria infection. Malaria is a…

Sexual reproduction is scarce in skin infection culprit. While some people love to feel the burn during a workout, we generally seek that sensation in our muscles—not our feet. Treading barefoot in damp, communal environments like gym showers and the perimeters of pools can expose us to the fungus Trichophyton rubrum, the most common cause…

Biolistic genetic transformation in C. neoformans produces few off-target side effects. While genome editing is a staple of genetics research, there remains anxiety about unintended side effects of genetic transformation, one of the most common longstanding genome-editing techniques. Some researchers fear that the process of introducing exogenous DNA into a cell may cause unwanted mutations,…

The yeast Candida albicans lives on and even inside many of us. Most of the time, its silent presence goes unnoticed, but this fungus can turn on its host, causing infections ranging in severity from annoying to life-threatening. For the yeast to become pathogenic, some of the C. albicans must transform from small, round cells…

When a group of microorganisms needs to stick together, they build a biofilm. The cells cement themselves together onto a surface, forming durable structures that are notoriously hard to remove. In a medical setting, biofilms can contribute to dangerous antibiotic resistance. In the August issue of G3, Cromie et al. use a yeast model to…

Taking probiotics might be the latest health fad, but for people with inflammatory bowel diseases, the microbiome is a more serious matter. With these autoimmune diseases, the composition of the gut microbiome can have critical health consequences. In the June issue of GENETICS, Mistry et al. use fruit flies to determine whether immune system activity…

In the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant—an area deemed unsafe for humans for the next 20,000 years after a catastrophic failure—life thrives. Fungi that reside there, along with other organisms that can survive large radiation doses, must have strategies to cope with the DNA-damaging effects of living at a meltdown site. In the…

Two highly similar genes that contribute to drug resistance in a pathogenic yeast have been co-evolving as tandem duplicates for the past 134 million years—while maintaining distinct functions. This is the conclusion of a paper in the April issue of GENETICS by Lamping et al. that examines the evolutionary effects of ectopic gene conversion. Evolutionary…

To the unaided eye, Antarctic soil and alpine glaciers may appear to be barren wastelands devoid of life. But some microbes call hostile habitats like these home. Research on one such organism, published in the latest issue of G3, reveals some of the mechanisms behind cold adaptation—and explains why these otherwise hardy creatures can’t survive…

In the fast-paced life of a bacterium, the ability to manufacture proteins quickly and efficiently is crucial. In these organisms, mRNAs—the templates for building proteins—have a string of bases near the start called the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) sequence. This motif increases the rate at which translation is initiated. Some results suggest that the presence of SD…

Guest post by Deepika Vasudevan. #TAGC16 Shorts are brief summaries of presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference, a combined meeting of seven genetics research communities held July 13-17, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. The microbes in our guts seem to affect almost every aspect of human health, from the obvious (e.g. metabolism1) to the unexpected (e.g.…