Unraveling the food web in your gut

Despite recent progress, the organization and ecological properties of the intestinal microbial ecosystem remain under investigated. Using a manually curated metabolic module framework for (meta-)genomic data analysis, Sara ...

How viruses infect bacteria: A tale of a tail

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Using state-of-the-art tools, EPFL scientists have described a million-atom "tail" that bacteriophages use to breach bacterial surfaces. The breakthrough has major implications ...

Do gut microbes shape our evolution?

Scientists increasingly realize the importance of gut and other microbes to our health and well-being, but one UC Berkeley biologist is asking whether these microbes—our microbiota—might also have played a role in shaping ...

Our gut microbiome is always changing; it's also remarkably stable

Turnover is to be expected in the gut—as soon as one bacterium leaves, another is ready to divide and take its place. The question, explored in a Review published March 17 in Trends in Microbiology, part of a special issue ...

Gut bacteria make cabbage poison harmless

The cabbage family contains rather toxic compounds. Greenfly, caterpillars and cabbage fly larvae attack cabbages and rapeseed ferociously nonetheless. How can that be? The secret lies in their gut, at least for the cabbage ...

Bacterial brawls mark life in the gut's microbiome

Bacterially speaking, it gets very crowded in the human gut, with trillions of cells jostling for a position to carry out a host of specialized and often crucial tasks. A new Yale study, published the week of March 7 in the ...

Tackling Zika—using bacteria as a Trojan horse

Bacteria in the gut of disease-bearing insects - including the mosquito which carries the Zika virus - can be used as a Trojan horse to help control the insects' population, new research at Swansea University has shown.

Sweet discovery in leafy greens holds key to gut health

A critical discovery about how bacteria feed on an unusual sugar molecule found in leafy green vegetables could hold the key to explaining how 'good' bacteria protect our gut and promote health.

Two-for-one bacterial virulence factor revealed

We've all seen the headlines. "Man found to be shedding virulent strain of polio"; "Virulent flu strain in Europe hits the economy"; "Most virulent strain of E. coli ever seen contains DNA sequences from plague bacteria."

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