Microbial Pathogenicity in Space

Mechanisms of Microbial Pathogenicity

The Boyden monograph should be available to every anatomist, thoracic surgeon, and diagnostician. It has occurred to this reviewer that a condensed version of the text, including only those sections concerned with surface anatomy and bronchial patterns, would be of great practical value to otolaryngologists and radiologists who are less frequently concerned with the finer anatomical details of ...

Common themes in microbial pathogenicity revisited.

Bacterial pathogens employ a number of genetic strategies to cause infection and, occasionally, disease in their hosts. Many of these virulence factors and their regulatory elements can be divided into a smaller number of groups based on the conservation of similar mechanisms. These common themes are found throughout bacterial virulence factors. For example, there are only a few general types o...

A Molecular Perspective of Microbial Pathogenicity

Molecular Koch's postulates applied to microbial pathogenicity.

Microbial genetics and molecular cloning now permit us to routinely isolate specific genes from a variety of microbial pathogens. Obviously not all genes from pathogenic microorganisms play a role in pathogenicity or virulence. Just as Koch's postulates were formulated to identify the causal relationship between an organism and a specific disease, the notion is presented here that a form of mol...

Appraisal of Microbial Evolution to Commensalism and Pathogenicity in Humans

The human body is host to a number of microbes occurring in various forms of host-microbe associations, such as commensals, mutualists, pathogens and opportunistic symbionts. While this association with microbes in certain cases is beneficial to the host, in many other cases it seems to offer no evident benefit or motive. The emergence and re-emergence of newer varieties of infectious diseases ...