News by Subject Biology

Scientists from Umeå university have shown how the yeast Candida albicans can modulate and adapt to low oxygen levels in different body niches to cause infection and to harm the host. Studying adaption to hypoxic or anoxic niches is particularly fruitful, since it helps us to understand the pathogenicity of C. albicans and promotes the development of better therapy approaches. Details about the study can be found in a report recently published in the journal MBio, a publication of the American Society of Microbiology.

Two new species of fungi have made an appearance in a rapidly melting glacier on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. A collaborative team of researchers from Japan's National Institute of Polar Research, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Tokyo, Japan, and Laval University in Québec, Canada made the discovery.

New work by a University of California, Berkeley team shows for the first time just how widespread and deadly the threat of pathogens from restoration nurseries may be to natural forests. The team surveyed five native plant nurseries in Northern California and found that four harbored exotic, or non-native, Phytophthora pathogens. New management techniques, coupled with new methods for detecting pathogens, can help these nurseries limit the spread of exotic pathogens into the wild.

Analyses of microbial community structures and whole genome sequencing were performed to the white colony-forming yeasts on kimchi surface. WiKim provides information for the safety of the white colony-forming yeasts on kimchi surface.

What's a feast for the human eye may be a literal feast for microorganisms that colonize works of art, according to a new study in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Elisabetta Caselli of the University of Ferrara, Italy, and colleagues. The researchers characterized the microbial community on a 17th century painting and showed that while some microbes destroy such works of art, others might be employed to protect them.

Some fungi are smelly and coated in mucus. Others have gills that glow in the dark. Some are delicious; others, poisonous. Some spur euphoria when ingested. Some produce antibiotics. All of these fungi -- and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more -- occur in North America. Of those that are known to science, 44,488 appear in a new checklist of North American fungi, published this month in the journal Mycologia.

Russian scientists together with colleagues from UK, Spain, Brazil, Japan and Austria have fully described the mechanism of fungal luminescence. They found that fungi utilize only four key enzymes to produce light and that transfer of these enzymes into other organisms makes them bioluminescent.

A new study by researchers of disease transmission in bats has broad implications for understanding hidden connections that can spread diseases between species and lead to large-scale outbreaks.