The human skin bacteria play an important role in the production of volatiles that attract mosquitoes. Using some most abundant bacterial species, we created vitro community models to assess whether increased microbial biodiversity could reduce attractiveness females dengue fever mosquito Aedes aegypti and co-culturing commensals affects overall attraction. More complex were less attractive fem...

Shigella spp. cause hundreds of millions intestinal infections each year. They target the mucosa human colon and are an important model intracellular bacterial pathogenesis. is a pathovar Escherichia coli that characterized by presence large invasion plasmid, pINV, which encodes characteristic type III secretion system icsA used for cytosol cell-to-cell spread, respectively. First, we review re...

The selective pressures leading to the evolution and maintenance of virulence in the case of facultative pathogens are quite unclear. For example, Escherichia coli, a commensal of the gut of warm-blooded animals and humans, can cause severe extraintestinal diseases, such as septicemia and meningitis, which represent evolutionary dead ends for the pathogen as they are associated to rapid host de...

We analyzed metabolic interactions and the importance of specific structural relationships in a benzyl alcohol-degrading microbial consortium comprising two species, Pseudomonas putida strain R1 and Acinetobacter strain C6, both of which are able to utilize benzyl alcohol as their sole carbon and energy source. The organisms were grown either as surface-attached organisms (biofilms) in flow cha...

Candida albicans is a fungal commensal-pathogen that persistently associates with its mammalian hosts. Between the commensal and pathogenic lifestyles, this microorganism inhabits host niches that differ markedly in the levels of bioavailable iron. A number of recent studies have exposed C. albicans specializations for acquiring iron from specific host molecules in regions where iron is scarce,...

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 ...