Microbiology

No one knows for sure how they got there. But the discovery that bacteria that normally live in the gut can be detected in the lungs of critically ill people and animals could mean a lot for…

Beer is the world's most commonly fermented beverage and lager beer commands 94 percent of the global market. Making the beer possible is a biological oddity: a hybrid yeast that combines two…

Gut microbes are all the rage and scholars everywhere are latching onto the fad. If you are over the age of 30, you have seen this too many times to count. Sugar causes diabetes, salt causes heart…

Though the claims that acrylamide is dangerous seem to be more manufactured hype than science, that isn't stopping the free market from providing an alternative. Renaissance BioScience Corp. has…

You might think microbreweries are novel and trendy. Okay, they may be trendy but they are not novel. An ancient microbrewery dating around 5,000 years old was recently unearthed in China at the…

The news that the Department of Defense had found a woman in Pennsylvania with a strain of E. coli carrying the gene mcr-1, the first time plasmid-mediated resistance to colistin (MCR) has been found…

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…

By the time Michelle Marineau saw her patient, James*, there was little she could do to help him. His big toe had been removed, a complication from years of uncontrolled type 2 diabetes, but the…

Viruses that infect bacteria are among the most abundant life forms on Earth. Indeed, our oceans, soils and potentially even our bodies would be overrun with bacteria were it not for bacteria-eating…

Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteristics of modern life forms, making their…