Antibiotics before infections save lives

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 days 22 hours (www.reuters.com)

Giving antibiotics to patients in intensive care units as a precaution saves lives, according to a major Dutch study published Wednesday.

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Drilling Holes Through Deadly Bacteria's Kevlar-like Hide

piggy submitted, created time 1 week 3 days (www.sciencedaily.com)

To protect themselves from human defenses, disease-causing bacteria have evolved a cell wall made from a nearly impenetrable tangle of tightly woven strands. That’s made it difficult for scientists to see what goes on inside these potentially deadly organisms. But that era is now over. Rockefeller University researchers have now figured out how to drill holes through the Kevlar-like hide of gram-positive bacteria without obliterating them, and in doing so, they’ve made it possible to study, from the inside out, most of the known bacteria on the planet.

The work, led by Vincent A

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Bacteria may play big role in forming fossils

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 1 week (www.sciencenews.org)

Paleontologists were stunned when fossils appearing to belong to the soft-tissued embryos of marine creatures were unearthed in Chinese sediments a decade ago

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Microbes drove Earth's mineral evolution

sea-maid submitted, created time 1 month 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

A comprehensive history of Earth's mineral wealth concludes that without life, many raw materials wouldn't exist. In the early interstellar medium, scientists say, there were about twelve minerals. The planetary formation process upped this to around sixty. The addition of water (itself a mineral) allows for more different kinds of reactions and the mineral count jumps into the hundreds

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Indole is an inter-species biofilm signal mediated by SdiA

Scarlett submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.biomedcentral.com)

Indole is an interspecies signal that decreases E. coli biofilms through SdiA and increases those of pseudomonads. Indole may be manipulated to control biofilm formation by oxygenases of bacteria that do not synthesize it in a dual-species biofilm. Furthermore, E. coli changes its biofilm in response to signals it cannot synthesize (homoserine lactones), and pseudomonads respond to signals they do not synthesize (indole).

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New science of metagenomics 'will transform modern microbiology'

addict submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.eurekalert.org)

The emerging field of metagenomics, where the DNA of entire communities of microbes is studied simultaneously, presents the greatest opportunity -- perhaps since the invention of the microscope -- to revolutionize understanding of the microbial world. The report calls for a new Global Metagenomics Initiative to drive advances in the field in the same way that the Human Genome Project advanced the mapping of our genetic code.

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