Author summary Klebsiella pneumoniae is a major human pathogen. While capsule is the main virulence factor of the pathogen, only several of more than 80 capsule serotypes are frequently identified in ...

Carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) poses critical threats to public health, with sequence type 11-capsular type 64 (ST11-KL64) CRKP dom…

Antimicrobial Resistance Research

Measles virus infection can cause long-term damage to the immune system.

The rise of Klebsiella pneumoniae combining antimicrobial resistance and virulence genes poses a major health threat, but the evolutionary routes and phenotypic consequences of this convergence are po...

Klebsiella pneumoniae, a major public health threat, resists antibiotics and can spread from the gut to the bloodstream, causing severe infections. Our study reveals how the immune system uses complement proteins C3 and C4 to block this spread. C3 limits bacterial growth in the gut through two potential mechanisms: (i) coating K. pneumoniae with fragments that signal bacteria-eating phagocytic cells to destroy it and (ii) recruiting more phagocytes into the gut. C3 also helps clear bacteria that escape into the blood. However, when antibiotic-resistant strains overgrow, C3 alone is insufficient. In these cases, C4 becomes critical, likely by enhancing C3’s ability to tag bacteria for elimination. This two-layered defense highlights new immune pathways that could be targeted to prevent bloodstream infections, especially in vulnerable patients or those colonized with drug-resistant bacteria. These insights open doors to innovative strategies against life-threatening Klebsiella infections.

Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence, accelerating viral evolution an...

Thomas Stanton and colleagues use whole genome sequencing to evaluate the prevalence of Klebsiella pneumoniae K and O antigen types in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia to help inform vaccine desi...

Bacteriophages and PICIs spread bacterial defenses via lateral transduction, shaping microbial immunity and pathogen evolution.

Staphylococcus aureus is a leading cause of bloodstream infections causing an estimated 300,000 deaths worldwide. Using a functional genomics approach, our group previously identified that adaptation ...

Biofilms represent the default mode of bacterial life in natural and built environments, with extracellular polysaccharides (exoPS) serving as essential structural and functional components of the bio...

Author summary Multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli ST410 has emerged as a high-risk global clone threatening both human and animal health. Phages offer promising alternatives to antibiotics, yet the ...

Prophages, phage genomes integrated into bacterial chromosomes, are widespread, yet, the extent to which these resident parasites contribute to host fitness and shape evolutionary trajectories, partic...

Chronic wound infection represents a major global public health concern, impacting both healthcare costs and patient quality of life (1, 2). Enterococcus faecalis is a Gram-positive opportunistic path...

Why are there so many co-circulating Klebsiella pneumoniae clones? Using genomics and large-scale metabolic modelling of >7000 isolates, this study identifies structured, clone-specific metabolic spec...

Low-copy-number plasmids often rely on dedicated maintenance mechanisms, such as partitioning systems, to ensure stable inheritance across generations. These partition systems actively segregate siste...

Molecular biology; Microbiology; Cell biology

Nucleotide triphosphate (NTP)-dependent molecular switches regulate essential cellular processes by cycling between active and inactive states thro...

Liver abscesses caused by hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (hvKp) can lead to severe metastatic complications, with mortality rates ranging from...

Unified strain taxonomies are needed for the epidemiological surveillance of bacterial pathogens and international communication in microbiological research. Core genome multilocus sequence typing (cg...

From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Large-scale sequencing and population genomic analyses reveal frequent transmission, a highly admixed global population structure and evidence of pervasive negative selection in Haemophilus influenzae...

Hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (HVKp) express a thick mucoid capsular polysaccharide which is essential for virulence and survival in the bloodstream but inhibits epithelial adhesion and invasion...

Understanding how complex, multi-gene systems evolve and function across genetic backgrounds is a central question in molecular evolution. While such systems often impose costs through epistatic inter...

Neonatal antibiotic use is shown to reduce immune response to infant vaccines, accompanied by reduced abundance of Bifidobacteria in the gut microbiota, with experiments in mice indicating that probio...

Research Assistant - Godlee Group (Fixed Term) in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge.

InducTn-seq, a method for inducible mutagenesis followed by transposon insertion site sequencing, enables temporal control of transposition to bypass population bottlenecks and enable the quantificati...

Nature Communications - Acute systemic immune activation may affect gut-luminal colonisation dynamics. Here, the authors show that LPS exposure in mice elevates gut-luminal oxygen species levels,...