Flagella are large transenvelope nanomachines but how they transit the peptidoglycan in gram-positive bacteria is poorly understood. A recent model...

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...

Abstract. The global emergence and dissemination of epidemic Clostridioides difficile ribotype 027 (RT027) and related lineages illustrate the role of anti

Author summary Clostridioides difficile is a major cause of severe gastrointestinal infections. Much of the damage caused during infection is driven by the large multidomain toxin, TcdB, making it a w...

A coordinated response to low iron and bacitracin enables Clostridioides difficile to survive in the gut.

Viruses are ubiquitous mobile genetic elements that are obligate symbionts of cellular life forms and replicate exclusively within host cells. The ...

Maset et al. show that bladder conditions strongly influence how urinary tract infections respond to antibiotics and bacteriophages, highlighting the need for more realistic lab models to improve diag...

Clostridioides difficile causes severe disease in adults but commonly colonizes infants asymptomatically. The consequences of early-life colonization on host development remain unknown. In a neonatal ...

Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is responsible for approximately 25% of all antibiotic-associated diarrhea (1, 2). In the United States, over 223,900 CDI cases occur annually, with a mortalit...

Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is an antibiotic-associated diarrheal disease. Mixed infection has been previously reported. However, its cli…

Fidaxomicin is a macrocyclic antibiotic recommended as the preferred antimicrobial treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) when available (1, 2). Fidaxomicin is as effective as oral van...

Using network analysis for inter-hospital spread and algorithmically optimising sentinel site selection, the authors design a surveillance system to rapidly detect emerging nosocomial pathogen strains...

Abstract. Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) is a leading cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea and colitis, with hypervirulent or resistant strains

Cephamycin antibiotics inhibit sporulation of the pathogenic bacterium Clostridioides difficile by targeting the spore protein SpoVD. Here, the authors show that isolates carrying the resistance gene ...

Author summary Most bacteria use orphan DNA methyltransferases to modify their genomes and alter their gene expression. While these modifications lead to changes in a bacterium’s phenotype, the specif...

Clostridioides difficile is the most common cause of health care-associated gastrointestinal infections and is responsible for approximately half a million infections and 30,000 deaths in the United S...

Microbial colonization of the human gut is typically inferred from species-level profiling, yet durable establishment operates at the strain level. He…

Bacterial infections may consist of different species that together form a polymicrobial community, as is the case in urinary tract infections (UTIs) (1–3). The response to antibiotic treatment of suc...

Natural transformation (NT), a major mechanism of horizontal gene transfer, promotes bacterial genome plasticity and contributes to the dissemination of antibiotic resistance. NT requires the developm...

Collateral effects in antibiotic sensitivity related to antibiotic resistance in Campylobacter jejuni.

Genetic factors aiding in the emergence of the opportunistic pathogen Clostridioides difficile are poorly understood. Infections with clade 3 (PCR ribotype 023) strains causing severe disease have increased since 2008. Here, we show RT023 strains have the unique ability to utilize xylitol, a sugar alcohol used as a food additive in humans and animals, due to the presence of a xylitol dehydrogenase (xdh) gene within a mobile genetic element (MGE). This xylitol utilization ability confers a fitness benefit in competition against other C. difficile ribotypes, as well as in a fecal community in vitro. Research investigating the underlying genetic factors driving the physiology of C. difficile will improve our understanding of colonization and hypervirulence.

Following an extended period of declining prevalence of the epidemic Clostridioides difficile ribotype 027 (RT027) in Portugal, a genetically distinct, multidrug-resistant (MDR) RT027 strain with r...

Linezolid-resistant Clostridioides difficile, conferred by the acquisition of cfr-like genes, has been reported in Europe and America. However, the emergence of linezolid resistance in C. difficile...

The authors review the intestinal muscularis – an increasingly recognized neuroimmune interface that orchestrates gut homeostasis, contributes to disease pathogenesis, and represents a therapeutic tar...

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...

Conjugative plasmids are a class of mobile genetic elements capable of efficient transfer between bacterial cells. Although they can introduce beneficial traits such as antibiotic resistance to recipi...

H-NS is an abundant nucleoid-associated protein found in Enterobacterales species. Some conjugative plasmids encode H-NS homologues, which are thought to facilitate plasmid maintenance and reduce the ...

Replication risk sequences (RRS) are recently discovered genomic structural elements that trigger post-replication gap formation during replisome passage. In E. coli , the two RRS elements are nearly ...

DNA assembly is a cornerstone of synthetic biology, enabling the construction of bespoke genetic systems for applications ranging from metabolic engineering to DNA nanotechnology. Conventional Gibson ...

🌐Breakthrough: Nature Communications Paper highlights effect of antibiotics prior to C. difficile colonization In a paper published in Nature Communications, Annefleur Hensen and colleagues detailed...

In most bacteria, peptidoglycan contains mainly 4-3 crosslinks formed by penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs). But in the opportunistic pathogen Clostridioides difficile , 70% of the crosslinks are 3-3 ...

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Experimental human colonisation with non-toxigenic Clostridioides difficile shows that antibiotic-mediated microbiota disruption, particularly prolonged treatment, increases susceptibility to C. diffi...