Data reveal how the global challenge to reduce deaths and infections from drug-resistant bacteria is not going according to plan.

Exposée à la polymyxine B, la bactérie tente de se protéger en fabriquant une armure… qui la conduit à sa perte.

Environmental stress drives biodiversity loss by altering competitive hierarchies and pushing taxa towards extinction. Parasites and their communities are particularly vulnerable to stress due to envi...

A team led by UCL (University College London) and Imperial College London researchers has shown for the first time how life-saving antibiotics called polymyxins pierce the armor of harmful bacteria.

Nobody expected the bacteria to commit suicide. But that is essentially what happens when polymyxin antibiotics attack, according to stunning new microscopy images that reveal how these last-resort drugs actually work after 80 years of clinical mystery. Researchers at University College London and Imperial College London have captured the first real-time images of polymyxin B piercing bacterial defenses, and the mechanism turns out to be far stranger than anyone predicted.

The top image shows an untreated E.coli bacterium; the bottom shows a bacterium after 90 minutes of being exposed to the antibiotic polymyxin B Carolina Borrelli, Edward Douglas et al./Nature Microbiology The way antibiotics called polymyxins pierce the armour of bacteria has been revealed in stunning detail by high-resolution microscopy, which could help us develop new treatments for drug-resistant infections. Polymyxins are commonly used as a last-resort treatment against some so-called gram-negative bacteria, which can cause infections such as pneumonia, meningitis and typhoid fever. “The top three World Health Organization priority pathogens are all gram-negative bacteria, and this is largely a reflection of their complex cell envelope,” says…

Many antibiotics are ineffective against Gram-negative pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa because they cannot penetrate the bacterial outer membrane. Here, we show that protein antibiotics calle...

Capsid-forming PICIs (cf-PICIs) produce their own capsids and exploit phage tails from unrelated species to transfer their DNA across bacterial hosts. This tail piracy enables broad dissemination and ...

By solving a previously unsolved biological question, the AI co-scientist predicted a complex mechanism of gene transfer and generated hypotheses that opened new research directions, illustrating AI's...

Two concurrent nationwide healthcare-associated outbreaks of Burkholderia cepacia complex linked to product contamination, UK and Ireland, 2010–2023