Opportunistic gram-negative bacterium causing chronic lung infections and biofilms, notably in cystic fibrosis patients, often antibiotic-resistant.
UMBC and Oklahoma State chemists showed that two linked proteins let Pseudomonas aeruginosa sense iron inside and outside the cell and rewire its metabolism. Because the same system also governs the biofilms that shield the microbe from drugs, they propose it as a drug target.
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Researchers in Korea found Pseudomonas aeruginosa uses two proteins, SlkA and SlkB, to plug the channels its pili pass through and block antibiotics. They say disrupting the plugs could be a way to make existing antibiotics work against a hard-to-treat superbug.
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Pseudomonas aeruginosa cells that reverse after bumping neighbours got 20% of their number out of an EPFL micro-maze, against 1% of mutants that cannot. The work shows touch steering a bacterial crowd on lab surfaces, and spread through tissue or soil was not tested.
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NTU scientists built a compound that starves Mycobacterium abscessus of energy; paired with the drug clofazimine it cut the microbe a hundredfold in four days. Two other teams mapped the same bacterium's virus defenses and a related pathogen's toxin-firing weapon.
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A PNAS study compared predicted tail fiber structures for phages tested on Pseudomonas aeruginosa and found the broader-spectrum ones differ from each other where they touch the bacterial pilus. Dozens of database relatives fit the same pattern.
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IBEC's XpertBiofilm holds shear stress between 0.02 and 0.9 mPa on a removable coverslip that a standard microplate reader can score, and within that range more flow produced more Pseudomonas aeruginosa biomass.
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SMART's antimicrobial resistance group and collaborators report in Nature Chemical Biology that AvaS uses a vitamin B6 derivative to convert lysidine into aminovaleramide cytidine, the first PLP enzyme found working on tRNA.
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In an aligned fluid, a Caltech group reports in PNAS, colonies grow as chains one cell wide that run straight and then kink in a single tight spot, which hands part of colony architecture to the medium.
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