A new perspective on ageing at the cellular level

Research team discovers unexpected differences in aging bacterial cells

13-Nov-2024 - Surprising findings on bacterial aging have emerged from a study carried out by a team of researchers led by the biologist Dr. Ulrich Steiner at Freie Universität Berlin. In a new paper published in Science Advances the team demonstrated that even genetically identical bacterial cells living in ...

Resistant bacteria can remain in the body for years

“These patients not only repeatedly become ill themselves, they also act as a source of infection for other people”

02-Feb-2024 - Fighting disease-causing bacteria becomes more difficult when antibiotics stop working. People with pre-existing conditions in particular can carry resistant germs and suffer from repeated infections for years, according to a study by the University of Basel and University Hospital ...

Moss repair team also works in humans

"If we could correct faulty sites in the genetic code with RNA editing methods, this would potentially also offer starting points for the treatment of hereditary diseases"

21-Sep-2022 - If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: they do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather ...

Large bacterial populations develop stronger resistance to antibiotics

In large populations, mutants that evolve relatively late resist antibiotic treatment more effectively, while smaller populations rely on less effective mutations that appear at an earlier point in time

09-Mar-2022 - An international team of scientists at Wageningen University (Netherlands) and the Institute for Biological Physics at the University of Cologne (Germany) have shown that small and large bacterial populations follow qualitatively different evolutionary paths: Larger populations develop stronger ...

Study reveals the inside of your car is dirtier than toilet

The steering wheel was found to be generally the cleanest area and could be due to the COVID-19 pandemic

15-Feb-2022 - A study by researchers in the College of Health and Life Sciences at Aston University and commissioned by Scrap Car Comparison has revealed that the inside of our cars have significantly higher levels of germs on them than the average toilet. The researchers took samples from car interiors with ...

Evolution in a test tube: these bacteria survive on deadly copper surfaces

Tiny survivalists in the lab produced and more closely studied

15-Jan-2021 - Even the descendants of regular bacteria can evolve to survive for a long time on metallic copper surfaces that would usually kill them within a few minutes. An international research team led by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Institute of Microbiology of the German ...

Grow faster, die sooner

How growth rates influence the fitness of bacteria: Antibiotic therapy with a carrot and a stick?

10-Aug-2020 - Bacteria are survival artists: When they get nutrition, they multiply rapidly, albeit they can also survive periods of hunger. But, when they grow too quickly, their ability to survive is hampered, as studies by a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) on E. coli bacteria show. ...

Sustainable use of CO2 using a modified bacterium

13-Mar-2020 - A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam-Golm, led by Dr. Arren Bar-Even, has succeeded in reprogramming the diet of the bacterium E. coli in such a way that it can use formic acid or methanol as its sole source of nutrition. These simple organic ...

RNA modification: Methylation and mopping up

10-Dec-2019 - LMU researchers have discovered a novel type of chemical modification in bacterial RNAs. The modification is apparently attached to molecules only when cells are under stress, and is rapidly removed during recovery. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is chemically closely related to the DNA that serves as ...

Unknown virus discovered in human body

Researchers have uncovered a new form of a virus that infects bacteria

15-Nov-2019 - An international team based in Austria has unearthed a previously unknown type of virus in samples of human bodily fluids. The researchers were looking for viruses that infect bacteria – known as bacteriophages – with an emphasis on those that attack the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacterium found ...