Microbiology

“Microbes are king of the world. If human beings ceased to exist, microbes wouldn’t even notice [except those in the human microbiome], but if microbes ceased to exist today, human beings would cease to exist tomorrow.”

Our fall issue of the MCB magazine focuses on the diverse ways in which microbes affect our health.

In work published in Infection and Immunity, graduate student Jessica Kelliher, from the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Kehl-Fie, investigated how the superbug Staphylococcus aureus regulates the acquisition of phosphate.

Using a suite of techniques both common and new to geology and biology, researchers, from left, M.D./Ph.D. student Jessica Saw, geologist and microbiologist Bruce Fouke, microscopy expert and plant biologist Mayandi Sivaguru and their colleagues made new discoveries about how kidney stones...

View the latest edition of MCB Magazine here.

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has announced the recipients of its 2018 annual alumni awards: Anne Carpenter, (PhD,'03 CSB) and Joanne Chory, (MS, '80 MICRO).

The Cronan lab recently published a paper in PNAS titled “Protein moonlighting elucidates the essential human pathway catalyzing lipoic acid assembly on its cognate enzymes.”

A cell’s efforts to respond and adapt to its external environment rely on an elaborate yet coordinated set of molecular partnerships within. The more we learn about this complicated internal dance, the more we appreciate the flexibility of its roles. In a recent University of Illinois study,...

Researchers report in a new study that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori – a major contributor to gastritis, ulcers and stomach cancer – resists the body’s immune defenses by shutting down energy production within the cells of the stomach lining that serve as a barrier to infection.

The study's findings were recently published in PNAS.