Microbe Mentor:Career Activities at ASM Microbe 2016

Host Specificity in Microbe-Microbe Interactions

ventional monocultural crop systems often supported by high inputs of pesticides and fertilizers to sustainable agriculture. Although precise definitions of sustainable agriculture vary, one key aspect is a reduction in agrichemical inputs with a corresponding shift to alternative crop protection strategies, such as cultural practices, organic amendments, resistant or tolerant crop varieties, a...

Expression of fluorescent proteins in Lactobacillus rhamnosus to study host–microbe and microbe–microbe interactions

Probiotic Lactobacillus strains are widely used to benefit human and animal health, although the exact mechanisms behind their interactions with the host and the microbiota are largely unknown. Fluorescent tagging of live probiotic cells is an important tool to unravel their modes of action. In this study, the implementation of different heterologously expressed fluorescent proteins for the lab...

Microbe Power!

Strategic Plan New Frontiers in Environmental Sciences and Human Health (NIEHS 2006c) seeks to " challeng[e] and energiz[e] the scientific community to use environmental health sciences to understand the causes of disease and to improve human health " (National Institutes of Health 2006). The strategic plan emphasizes, among other things, integrative research, community-linked research, and pri...

Cell biology at the host–microbe interface

Manipulation of membrane dynamics Nihal Altan-Bonnet (National Institutes of Health) described positive-sense RNA enteroviruses that manipulate the host to generate phosphatidylinositol 4-phosphate (PI4P) and cholesterol-rich membrane platforms for efficient viral replication. The enzyme PI4KIIIβ is hijacked by the enteroviral protein 3A to generate new pools of PI4P at these membrane platforms...

The Microbe of Cancer