Arthropods in healthcare environments commonly harbor clinically relevant and antimicrobial-resistant microbes, and limited but compelling evidence supports their potential role in patient transmission. Strengthened pest management and environmental hygiene are essential components of infection prev …

<span><b>Introduction.</b> Chronic wounds are notoriously difficult to treat and are associated with decreased limb function, reduced quality of life and significant morbidity. Their recurrent nature, despite aggressive antibiotic therapy, is due in part to the presence of polymicrobial biofilms. <i>Pseud</i></span> …

Predatory bacteria are common in aquatic environments and associated with eukaryotic hosts. Here, we report draft genome sequences for two marine isolates, <i>Halobacteriovorax</i> sp. strains GFR7 and GFR8, that were isolated from Dickerson Bay in Apalachicola Bay, Florida, USA.

R-pyocins are phage tail-like protein complexes produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa that deliver a single, lethal hit by depolarizing the target cell membrane. Unlike phages, R-pyocins lack capsids and...

Abstract. Predation is a top-down regulator of ecosystem integrity and a key driver of community structure and evolution in plants and animals. Despite our

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Bacterial immune systems have evolved in response to diverse molecular "parasites", yet their ecological roles remain poorly understood. This Essay explores how interactions between mobile genetic ele...

<span><i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> is a common commensal of human skin and anterior nares but also a notable pathogen, causing a range of diseases from minor skin infections to serious, often fatal conditions. The global health community considers <i>S. aureus</i> a serious threat due to the rise of multi</span> …

<span><i>Burkholderia pseudomallei,</i> a gram-negative saprophyte that causes melioidosis, has been classified as a potential bioweapon, posing a serious global threat. Metabolic re-wiring, production of virulence effectors, evasion/suppression of host defenses, and modification of host cell functions co</span> …

Extreme drought events are predicted to increase with climate change, yet their impacts on ecosystem carbon dynamics under warming and elevated carbon dioxide (eCO₂) remain unclear. In a peatland experiment with five warming treatments each under ambient carbon dioxide (aCO₂) a …

Automated high-throughput screening of a prefractionated extract library of marine macroorganisms identified 239 hits (hit rate 2.5%), including a marine algal extract that blocked the Na_v1.7 channel in a fluorescent-based flux assay. Bioactivity-guided chemical investigation led to the i …

A recent study shows that the spatial organization of bacteria in thin films or near air-water interfaces is strongly impacted by a purely physical mechanism - capillary interactions. This mechanism likely plays an important role in bacterial assortment in environments like soil, which undergo wet a …

Clinicians often prescribe empirical antibiotics for critically ill, intubated children with suspected respiratory infections, contributing to antibiotic overuse and challenging antimicrobial stewardship. Our longitudinal tracheal aspirate analysis of cultures and 16S rDNA sequencing revealed significant inter-patient variability, regardless of the primary reason for intubation. We observed both concordance and discrepancies between clinical microbiology and sequencing results—gram-negative organisms aligned well between methods, whereas Streptococcus was detected in 34 of 39 samples by 16S rDNA but only once by culture. Our findings emphasize the value of longitudinal airway microbiome analysis in pediatric patients. Given the heterogeneous pathologies and diverse age groups in pediatric intensive care, future large-scale studies should account for antibiotic exposure, commensal bacterial interactions, and clinical conditions that influence microbiome dynamics. Expanding research in this area could improve our understanding of microbial shifts in critically ill children and inform more targeted treatment strategies.

Micro milling is a subtractive manufacturing method for fabricating micro-scale three-dimensional features from hard substrates like acrylic, wood, or metal. It enables rapid prototyping of biomicrofl...

Salt marshes are vital coastal ecosystems. Microbes in these environments drive nutrient cycling and support plant health, with Spartina alterniflora serving as a foundation species. This study explores viral communities associated with S. alterniflora, revealing how plant compartments and phenotypes shape viral composition. The discovery of numerous novel viruses, some potentially influencing microbes involved in key biogeochemical processes, highlights their ecological significance. Given the increasing pressures on coastal ecosystems, understanding virus-microbe-plant interactions is essential for predicting and managing ecosystem responses to environmental change.

Changes in bacterial colony morphology are common during chronic human infections and are thought to provide a survival advantage. In the human pathogen <i>Mycobacteroides abscessus</i> (MAB), a unidirectional transition from a smooth (MAB^S) to rough (MAB^R) morphotype frequentl …

Bacterial quorum sensing is often assumed to follow a strict hierarchy, limiting understanding of how multiple signals interact. This study finds that Pseudomonas aeruginosa uses a reciprocal, coopera...

Chair, School of Biological Sciences Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta The School of Biological Sciences of the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) invites applications for the pos...

Climate change is expected to impact microbes degrading organic matter in northern peatlands. Here, using a warming experiment, the authors show that communities remain stable after three years of war...

Deciphering the biology of natural microbial communities is limited by the lack of functional data. While transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling, mRNA levels often fail to predict protein abundance, the primary indicator of microbial function. ...

In vivo experiments and mathematical modelling in this work, show that alveolar macrophages lower phage densities and phage-bacteria contact rates, limiting the effectiveness of synergistic treatment ...

Bacterial biofilms, surface-attached microbial communities, grow horizontally across surfaces and vertically above them. Although a simple heuristic model for vertical growth was experimentally shown ...

Metabolically generated flow is an emergent mechanism that alleviates diffusion limits in macroscopic multicellular yeast.

In this primer, we will review the key distinctions between acute and chronic infections, between mono- and polymicrobial infections and how these distinctions work together to generate the growing cr...

Covering: 2015 to 2025Chemical crosstalk is universal to all life, niche-specific, and essential to thrive. This crosstalk is mediated by a large diversity of molecules, including metal ions, small mo...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a functionally versatile bacterium, a leading opportunistic human pathogen and a model organism in microbiology. In this Review, Letizia, Diggle and Whiteley discuss P. aerug...

The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus and the bacterium Burkholderia cenocepacia cause fatal respiratory infections in immunocompromised humans and patients with lung disease, such as cystic fibrosis (CF). In dual infections, antagonistic interactions contribute to increased mortality. These interactions are further altered by the presence of antimicrobial and antifungal agents. However, studies performed to date on chemical interactions between clinical B. cenocepacia and A. fumigatus have focused on pathogens in isolation and do not include the most abundant chemical signal, i.e., clinically administered therapeutics, present in the lung. Here, we characterize small molecule-mediated interactions between B. cenocepacia and A. fumigatus and their shift in response to trimethoprim exposure by using metabolomics and mass spectrometry imaging. Using these methods, we report that the production of several small-molecule natural products of both the bacteria and the fungus is affected by cocultivation and exposure to trimethoprim. By systematic analysis of metabolomics data, we hypothesize that the B. cenocepacia-encoded ham gene cluster plays a role in the trimethoprim-mediated alteration of bacterial–fungal interactions. We support our findings by generating a genetically modified strain lacking the ham gene cluster and querying its interaction with A. fumigatus. Using comparative analyses of the extracts of wild-type and knockout strains, we report the inactivation of a bacterially produced antifungal compound, fragin, by A. fumigatus, which was verified by the addition of purified fragin to the A. fumigatus culture. Furthermore, we report that trimethoprim does not inhibit fungal growth, but affects the biochemical pathway for DHN-melanin biosynthesis, an important antifungal drug target, altering the pigmentation of the fungal conidia and is associated with modification of ergosterol to ergosteryl-3β-O-l-valine in coculture. This study demonstrates the impact of therapeutics on shaping microbial and fungal metabolomes, which influence interkingdom interactions and the expression of virulence factors. Our findings enhance the understanding of the complexity of chemical interactions between therapeutic compounds, bacteria, and fungi and may contribute to the development of selective treatments.

Abstract. Sea cucumbers have been overharvested world-wide, making assessments of their ecological effects challenging, but recent research demonstrated th

The daily cycle of photosynthetic primary production at the base of marine food webs is often limited by the availability of scarce nutrients. Micr...

Author summary Bacterial infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii are a major global health concern due to high antibiotic resistance, earning it a critical priority pathogen ranking by the WHO. P...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) pose negative worldwide impacts that could be minimized through the development of a forecasting tool. Quantitative analysis of peptides produced by a coastal microbiome pr...

Here, we ask a simple question: what are the dynamics of pathogen-induced death? Death is a central phenotype in both biomedical and epidemiological infectious disease biology, yet very little work ha...

Metaproteomics, an emerging field among the omic techniques, holds great promise for unraveling the function of microbiomes in host health and our environment. Metaproteomics can also be a valuable a...

Long-term studies provide insights into the complex interplay between evolutionary process and pattern across multiple systems and timescales.

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its...

npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - R-pyocins as targeted antimicrobials against Pseudomonas aeruginosa

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Sphagnum mosses are vital for storing carbon in northern peatlands but are sensitive to climate warming. They host microbes that help with nutrient uptake and carbon cycling, and recent studies sugge....

Abstract. The evolution of multicellularity represents a major transition in life’s history, enabling the rise of complex organisms. Multicellular groups c

Virus population dynamics are driven by counter-balancing forces of production and loss. Whereas viral production arises from complex interactions wit…

How did early multicellular organisms manage to exploit rising oxygen levels? By modeling facilitated diffusion and expressing animal oxygen-binding proteins in snowflake yeast, this study shows that ...

The growth of a biofilm—a bacterial colony attached to a surface—is governed by a trade-off between horizontal and vertical expansion. Now, it is shown that this process significantly depends on the c...

The authors created a multisite database to link microbial methane-cycling networks to CH4 fluxes across diverse wetlands, revealing differences in microbial cross-feeding and methanogen dynamics that...

Coral reefs are hotspots of marine biodiversity, which results in the synthesis of a wide variety of compounds with unique molecular scaffolds, and bioactivities, rendering reefs an ecosystem of interest. The chemodiversity stems from the intricate relationships between inhabitants of the reef, as the chemistry produced partakes in intra- and interspecies communication, settlement, nutrient acquisition, and defense. However, the coral reefs are declining at an unprecedented rate due to climate change, pollution, and increased incidence of pathogenic diseases. Among pathogens, Vibrio spp. bacteria are key players resulting in high mortality. Thus, alternative strategies such as application of beneficial bacteria isolated from disease-resilient species are being explored to lower the burden of pathogenic species. Here, we apply coculturing of a coral-derived pathogenic species of Vibrio and beneficial bacteria and leverage recent advancements in untargeted metabolomics to discover engineerable beneficial traits. By chasing chemical change in coculture, we report Microbulbifer spp.-mediated degradation of amphibactins, produced by Vibrio spp. bacteria to sequester iron. Additional biochemical experiments revealed that the degradation occurs in the peptide backbone and requires the enzyme fraction of Microbulbifer. A reduction in iron affinity is expected due to the loss of one Fe(III) binding moiety. Therefore, we hypothesize that this degradation shapes community behaviors as it pertains to iron acquisition, a limiting nutrient in the marine environment, and survival. Furthermore, Vibrio sp. bacteria suppressed natural product synthesis by beneficial bacteria. Understanding biochemical mechanisms behind these interactions will enable engineering probiotic bacteria capable of lowering pathogenic burdens during heat waves and incidence of disease.

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has revolutionized biology, but many steps in RNA-seq workflows can introduce variance, potentially compromising reproducibility. While reproducibility in RNA-seq has been tho...

Candida glabrata is a fungal microbe associated with multiple vertebrate microbiomes and their terrestrial environments. In humans, the species has emerged as an opportunistic pathogen that now ranks ...

Scientific Data - Microbial Metagenomes Across a Complete Phytoplankton Bloom Cycle: High-Resolution Sampling Every 4 Hours Over 22 Days

Previous research profiling gene expression, proteins, and metabolites produced during thermal stress have reported the importance of endosymbiont-derived pathways in coral bleaching resistance. Howev...