See also stories tagged with Microbiology
Researchers at ETH Zurich have engineered bacteria in the laboratory to efficiently use methanol. The metabolism of these bacteria can now be tapped into to produce valuable products currently made by the chemical industry ...
It's true that our 16th-century ancestors drank much more than Irish people do today. But why they did so and what their beer was like are questions shrouded in myth. The authors were part of a team who set out to find some ...
Soil bacteria help regulate the cycling of carbon and nutrients on Earth. Over time, these bacteria have evolved strategies that determine where they live, what they do, and how they deal with a changing environment. However, ...
Copper is a natural antimicrobial material that, when added to pig feed, may promote the growth and health of the animals. Since pigs can tolerate high levels of the metal, researchers at Texas Tech University in Amarillo ...
Researchers have discovered toxic protein particles, shaped like umbrellas, that soil bacteria known as Streptomyces secrete to squelch competitors, especially others of their own species.
Prolonged droughts followed by sudden bursts of rainfall—how do desert soil bacteria manage to survive such harsh conditions? This long-debated question has now been answered by an ERC project led by microbiologist Dagmar ...
Whether life exists anywhere besides Earth is a burning question that, at long last, may soon be answered.
From house plants and gardens to fields and forests, green is the color we most associate with surface life on Earth, where conditions favored the evolution of organisms that perform oxygen-producing photosynthesis using ...
An international research team has investigated the biosynthesis of psilocybin, the main ingredient of hallucinogenic mushrooms. They gained new insights into the structure and reaction mechanism of the enzyme PsiM. It plays ...
A component of the human intestinal flora that has been little studied to date is the focus of a new study from Germany. Plasmids are small extrachromosomal genetic elements that frequently occur in bacterial cells and can ...
