Topic
Antimicrobial resistance is the capacity of bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites to survive drugs that once killed them, making infections harder to treat.
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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Nature warns that resistance is already emerging to the WHO's six-month, bedaquiline-based TB regimen, in a disease that killed 1.23 million people in 2024. Nobody can yet say how common that resistance is, because the surveillance data needed to count it are scarce.
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University of Oregon biologists revived antimicrobial peptides up to 160 million years old, and some killed drug-resistant bacteria better than modern versions. The lab work suggests evolutionary history is a real source of leads against antibiotic-resistant infections.
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University of Otago researchers built a CRISPR method that disrupts genes across whole phage genomes to tell the essential from the dispensable. Reported in Nature Microbiology, the same transposon can also carry new genes in, so it maps function and engineers it in one step.
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University of Oregon biologists rebuilt lactoferrin's bacteria-killing peptide across 160 million years. The strongest candidates came from recent ancestors; the oldest one let bacteria heal.
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University of Colorado Anschutz researchers have spent 15 years building a refrigerated library of more than 30 phages against drug-resistant gut bacteria. The stock can be screened for a virus that matches a patient's strain, though cure rates in people are not reported.
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Penn State found age reshaped the resistance genes of 320 broiler chickens far more than antibiotic, probiotic or essential-oil feed did. With the antibiotic diet also flat, the three-week trial cannot show the alternatives reduce resistance.
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A team at HIPS, the Institut Pasteur and Universite Paris Cite reports that corramycin attacks the same enzyme as fluoroquinolones by a different route and stays active against isolates those drugs no longer touch. An earlier program dropped the compound over production cost.
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Arkansas researchers report that plasma etching held E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa down for 24 hours on films made from the protein fraction, while whole-bran films barely etched at all.
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A Trends in Microbiology opinion piece from DTU and Copenhagen argues that temperature, oxygen and pH decide whether a resistance gene makes a bacterium resistant, while the standard laboratory test holds all three fixed and returns one binary answer.
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A team trained on antimicrobial peptide data to rank a library of 1.7 million polymers, then sent to the bench the candidates its models split hardest over, on the theory that the models' disagreement marks the experiments most likely to be informative.
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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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Gut phage therapy usually fails because you cannot get enough phage to enough bacteria in time. A team writing in Nature Microbiology built a resident E. coli that makes the phage on site, and it protected mice against an oral Salmonella challenge.
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The 98% sensitivity behind that count came from a single case-control comparison at the University of Malaga, in which ImmunoCAP, the most widely used commercial assay, detected about 17% of the same patients.
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Indiana University biologists deleted PBP1 expecting a leakier cell wall and an easier flagellum build, and instead watched cells burst as soon as the tail was finished, which turns wall repair into a target that only bites during assembly.
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The plan is to find the genes that let urinary-tract bacteria survive the copper the body throws at them, then disable those genes so the immune response does the killing. No results from the new work yet.
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Two Trinity College Dublin studies ran soil microbial communities for 16 weeks under a fungicide, under warming, and under both. One paper reports antibiotic resistance in the exposed bacteria; the other reports weaker barley.
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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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A UCL micro-bladder with cycling urine pushed uropathogenic E. coli inside the bladder lining, where an antibiotic that looks reliable in standard tests fell short and a phage cocktail cut the hidden reservoirs it left behind.
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Harry Lerner and David Schleheck buried polyester film in forest humus for a year, then pulled from the soil metagenome a cell-surface esterase whose fold and activity both point toward beta-lactamases.
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