Chair, School of Biological Sciences Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta The School of Biological Sciences of the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) invites applications for the pos...

Climate change is expected to impact microbes degrading organic matter in northern peatlands. Here, using a warming experiment, the authors show that communities remain stable after three years of war...

Deciphering the biology of natural microbial communities is limited by the lack of functional data. While transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling, mRNA levels often fail to predict protein abundance, the primary indicator of microbial function. ...

In vivo experiments and mathematical modelling in this work, show that alveolar macrophages lower phage densities and phage-bacteria contact rates, limiting the effectiveness of synergistic treatment ...

Bacterial biofilms, surface-attached microbial communities, grow horizontally across surfaces and vertically above them. Although a simple heuristic model for vertical growth was experimentally shown ...

Metabolically generated flow is an emergent mechanism that alleviates diffusion limits in macroscopic multicellular yeast.

In this primer, we will review the key distinctions between acute and chronic infections, between mono- and polymicrobial infections and how these distinctions work together to generate the growing cr...

Covering: 2015 to 2025Chemical crosstalk is universal to all life, niche-specific, and essential to thrive. This crosstalk is mediated by a large diversity of molecules, including metal ions, small mo...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a functionally versatile bacterium, a leading opportunistic human pathogen and a model organism in microbiology. In this Review, Letizia, Diggle and Whiteley discuss P. aerug...

The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus and the bacterium Burkholderia cenocepacia cause fatal respiratory infections in immunocompromised humans and patients with lung disease, such as cystic fibrosis (CF). In dual infections, antagonistic interactions contribute to increased mortality. These interactions are further altered by the presence of antimicrobial and antifungal agents. However, studies performed to date on chemical interactions between clinical B. cenocepacia and A. fumigatus have focused on pathogens in isolation and do not include the most abundant chemical signal, i.e., clinically administered therapeutics, present in the lung. Here, we characterize small molecule-mediated interactions between B. cenocepacia and A. fumigatus and their shift in response to trimethoprim exposure by using metabolomics and mass spectrometry imaging. Using these methods, we report that the production of several small-molecule natural products of both the bacteria and the fungus is affected by cocultivation and exposure to trimethoprim. By systematic analysis of metabolomics data, we hypothesize that the B. cenocepacia-encoded ham gene cluster plays a role in the trimethoprim-mediated alteration of bacterial–fungal interactions. We support our findings by generating a genetically modified strain lacking the ham gene cluster and querying its interaction with A. fumigatus. Using comparative analyses of the extracts of wild-type and knockout strains, we report the inactivation of a bacterially produced antifungal compound, fragin, by A. fumigatus, which was verified by the addition of purified fragin to the A. fumigatus culture. Furthermore, we report that trimethoprim does not inhibit fungal growth, but affects the biochemical pathway for DHN-melanin biosynthesis, an important antifungal drug target, altering the pigmentation of the fungal conidia and is associated with modification of ergosterol to ergosteryl-3β-O-l-valine in coculture. This study demonstrates the impact of therapeutics on shaping microbial and fungal metabolomes, which influence interkingdom interactions and the expression of virulence factors. Our findings enhance the understanding of the complexity of chemical interactions between therapeutic compounds, bacteria, and fungi and may contribute to the development of selective treatments.

Abstract. Sea cucumbers have been overharvested world-wide, making assessments of their ecological effects challenging, but recent research demonstrated th

The daily cycle of photosynthetic primary production at the base of marine food webs is often limited by the availability of scarce nutrients. Micr...

Author summary Bacterial infections caused by Acinetobacter baumannii are a major global health concern due to high antibiotic resistance, earning it a critical priority pathogen ranking by the WHO. P...

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) pose negative worldwide impacts that could be minimized through the development of a forecasting tool. Quantitative analysis of peptides produced by a coastal microbiome pr...

Here, we ask a simple question: what are the dynamics of pathogen-induced death? Death is a central phenotype in both biomedical and epidemiological infectious disease biology, yet very little work ha...

Metaproteomics, an emerging field among the omic techniques, holds great promise for unraveling the function of microbiomes in host health and our environment. Metaproteomics can also be a valuable a...

Long-term studies provide insights into the complex interplay between evolutionary process and pattern across multiple systems and timescales.

In the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment, diploid yeast evolve to be tetraploid under selection for larger multicellular size, revealing how whole-genome duplication can arise due to its...

npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - R-pyocins as targeted antimicrobials against Pseudomonas aeruginosa

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Sphagnum mosses are vital for storing carbon in northern peatlands but are sensitive to climate warming. They host microbes that help with nutrient uptake and carbon cycling, and recent studies sugge....

Abstract. The evolution of multicellularity represents a major transition in life’s history, enabling the rise of complex organisms. Multicellular groups c

Virus population dynamics are driven by counter-balancing forces of production and loss. Whereas viral production arises from complex interactions wit…

How did early multicellular organisms manage to exploit rising oxygen levels? By modeling facilitated diffusion and expressing animal oxygen-binding proteins in snowflake yeast, this study shows that ...