How life on Earth began

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New approach to treating infectious diseases as an alternative to antibiotics

Image
Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is known as a major cause of diarrhea in travelers and people living in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), ETEC is responsible for 300,000 ~ 500,000 deaths a year, constituting a serious problem. Effective vaccines for ETEC have not been developed, so patients infected with ETEC are treated with antibiotics and supporting measures. However, the emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria has become a social issue, so the development of new treatment methods is sought after. Adherence to the host intestinal epithelium is an essential step for ETEC infection in humans. It was thought that a filamentous structure on the surface of bacteria called 'type IV pilus' was important for bacterial attachment, but its detailed adhesion mechanism was not known. Osaka University-led researchers clarified how pathogenic E.coli attached to the host intestinal epithelium using type IV pili and secre...
Read more

A Microscopic 'wind Farm' Powered By Bacteria

Image
Many of society’s energy challenges require gigawatts of power , but many more are small – and some are entirely microscopic. To drive a new generation of tiny micromachines that could deliver drugs or clean traces of pollution , physicists are increasingly looking to biology for inspiration. In work published in the journal Science Advances , my co-authors and I present a simulation of a sort of tiny “windfarm” powered by the natural self-organisation of bacteria. It’s a small step towards harnessing the energy potential of microorganisms. Active fluid-powered windfarms We used computer simulations to model many swimming bacteria, such as the E. coli you find in your gut. A dense crowd of these swimming bacteria isn’t too different from traditional, passive liquid, though there’s one major exception: it spontaneously flows, with internal whirling currents. Physicists have started calling anything that spontaneously flows in this way an “ active fluid ”. It looks som...
Read more

Fussy eaters: the favoured food of Salmonella

Image
As antibiotic resistance increases the search for new anti-bacterial treatments becomes more and more important. One way to design anti-bacterials is to find specific biochemical pathways that the bacteria require to survive, and develop drugs that block off these pathways. Some pathways are better targets than others and for  Salmonella bacteria it was thought that pathways dealing with nutrient metabolises would be a lost cause. Salmonella lives in the intestine, which hosts a whole variety of different nutrients, so surely preventing the bacteria from using a specific one wouldn’t cause them much undue distress. It’s been found, however, that as they grow and spread in the inflamed intestine the bacteria are heavily reliant on one particular nutrient: fructose-asparagine. The chemical structure of fructose-asparagine, image from the reference. The importance of fructose-asparagine metabolism was originally discovered durin...
Read more