years later Perroncito sketched the microbe. Detailed observations were not made 011 t1, disease until 1879-80, when Toussaint demonstrated that a microbe was the cause of the infectivity of the blood, and Pasteur observed that birds, when fed upon the smallest drop of a recent culture of the micro-organism, became infected via the nlimentary canal, and that the infected excreta were a cause of...

During the last decades, research on the function of volatile organic compounds focused primarily on the interactions between plants and insects. However, microorganisms can also release a plethora of volatiles and it appears that microbial volatile organic compounds (mVOCs) can play an important role in intra- and inter-kingdom interactions. So far, most studies are focused on aboveground vola...

Metagenomics, the study of the total genetic material isolated from a biological host, promises to reveal host-microbe or microbe-microbe interactions that may help to personalize medicine or improve agronomic practice. We introduce a method that discovers metagenomic units (MGUs) relevant for phenotype prediction through sequence-based dictionary learning. The method aggregates patient-specifi...

Sponges have a significant impact on marine benthic communities, they are of biotechnological interest owing to their production of bioactive natural compounds, and they promise to provide insights into conserved mechanisms of host-microbe interactions in basal metazoans. The natural variability of sponge-microbe associations across species and environments provides a meaningful ecological and ...

Microbes that protect their hosts from pathogens are widespread in nature and are attractive disease control agents. Given that pathogen adaptation to barriers against infection can drive changes in pathogen virulence, 'defensive microbes' may shape disease severity. Here we show that co-evolving a microbe with host-protective properties (Enterococcus faecalis) and a pathogen (Staphylococcus au...

An unintended consequence of global industrialization and associated societal rearrangements is new interactions of microbes and potential hosts (especially mammals and plants), providing an opportunity for the rapid emergence of host-microbe adaptation and eventual establishment of new microbe-related diseases. We describe a new model system comprising the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and ...

Division of Host-Microbe Systems and Therapeutics, Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA; Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA; Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA Correspondence to: Alison Coady, PhD. Division of Host-...

In complex biological systems, small molecules often mediate microbe-microbe and microbe-host interactions. Using a systematic approach, we identified 3,118 small-molecule biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in genomes of human-associated bacteria and studied their representation in 752 metagenomic samples from the NIH Human Microbiome Project. Remarkably, we discovered that BGCs for a class of a...

Microbe-electrode-interactions are keys for microbial fuel cell technology. Nevertheless, standard measurement routines to analyze the interplay of microbial physiology and material characteristics have not been introduced yet. In this study, graphite anodes with varying surface properties were evaluated using pure cultures of Shewanella oneidensis and Geobacter sulfurreducens, as well as defin...

New ways to assess plant–microbe interactions can yield unexpected paths biodiversity.