Mycobacteria elaborate a great variety of glycolipids of rather exotic structure. Some of these lipids are abundant cell envelope components and are exposed on the bacterial surface. These comprise the species-specific phenolic glycolipids, glycopeptidolipids, sulfatides, and lipooligosaccharides, and the ubiquitous phosphatidylinositolmannosides. Because pathogenic mycobacterial species are fa...

In the last 25 years, no less than 10 dramatic morbilliviral epidemics have occurred among free-ranging pinniped and cetacean species and populations worldwide. The origin(s) of the new Morbillivirus genus members causing these mass mortality events, along with the reason(s) behind their “sudden” appearance among wild aquatic mammals, are totally unknown (Di Guardo et al., 2005, 2011b). Interes...

Salmonella enterica infections result in diverse clinical manifestations. Typhoid fever, caused by S. enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi) and S. Paratyphi A, is a bacteremic illness but whose clinical features differ from other Gram-negative bacteremias. Non-typhoidal Salmonella (NTS) serovars cause self-limiting diarrhea with occasional secondary bacteremia. Primary NTS bacteremia can occur in t...

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) production by immunological cells is known to cause damage to pathogens. Increasing evidence accumulated in the last decade has shown, however, that ROS (and redox signals) functionally regulate different cellular pathways in the host-pathogen interaction. These especially affect (i) pathogen entry through protein redox switches and redox modification (i.e., intra-...

UNLABELLED The gut microbiota enhances the host's metabolic capacity for processing nutrients and drugs and modulate the activities of multiple pathways in a variety of organ systems. We have probed the systemic metabolic adaptation to gut colonization for 20 days following exposure of axenic mice (n = 35) to a typical environmental microbial background using high-resolution (1)H nuclear magnet...

Since their discovery by Craigie and Yen (1938), the Vi typing phages have been extensively employed in the study of the epidemiology of typhoid fever. Susceptibility to these phages is related to the presence of the Vi antigen, a component found in almost all freshly isolated typhoid cultures. The specific typing preparations, which produce confluent lysis with their homologous typhoid strains...

In the 1970s ecological research detected chaos and other forms of complex dynamics in simple population dynamics models, initiating a new research tradition in ecology. However, the investigations of complex population dynamics have mainly concentrated on single populations and not on higher dimensional ecological systems. Here we report a detailed study of the complicated dynamics occurring i...

Studies on the virus-cell interactions have proven valuable in elucidating vital cellular processes. Interestingly, certain virus-host membrane interactions found in eukaryotic systems seem also to operate in prokaryotes (Bamford, D.H., M. Romantschuk, and P. J. Somerharju, 1987. EMBO (Eur. Mol. Biol. Organ.) J. 6:1467-1473; Romantschuk, M., V.M. Olkkonen, and D.H. Bamford. 1988. EMBO (Eur. Mol...