The manufacturing microbe

The manufacturing microbe

In all industrialized countries, the manufacturing industry appears to be in difficulty: the costs of maintaining skilled workers to do complicated technical tasks are becoming a major hurdle. The fact that a majority of the young professionals will spend their whole lives just typing in front of a screen is worrying plenty of sociologists, particularly because of the simple fact that our brain...

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...

The Microbe of Cancer

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...