In Memoriam: Abigail Salyers

Abigail Salyers
During her 40-year career, Abigail Salyers revolutionized how we think about the bacteria that live in the human intestinal tract, helped design antibiotic drugs, and provided a voice of reason in discussions on bioterrorism, transgenic plant safety, antibiotic resistance in medicine and...

It takes a(n academic) village to determine an enzyme's function

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Professor of Microbiology John Cronan, Professor of Biochemistry John Gerlt and Professor of Chemistry Jonathan Sweedler, along with colleagues from two other institutions, teamed up to discover the role of an enzyme known as HpbD in its bacterial host, Pelagibaca bermudensis.

A protease for 'middle-down' proteomics

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Cong Wu, a graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry, is the first author on "A protease for 'middle-down' proteomics" in Nature Methods.

Team Discovers Microbes Speciating

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Not that long ago in a hot spring in Kamchatka, Russia, two groups of genetically indistinguishable microbes parted ways. They began evolving into different species – despite the fact that they still encountered one another in their acidic, boiling habitat and even exchanged some genes from time to...

Team discovers how a cancer-causing bacterium spurs cell death

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A new study led by Professor of Microbiology Stephen Blanke, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show how a bacterial toxin can disrupt a cell's mitochondria – its energy-generation and distribution system – to disable the cell and spur apoptosis (programmed cell...