653 papers
Microbiology explores the invisible world of tiny life forms that shape our health, environment, and even the air we breathe. From bacteria and viruses to fungi and parasites, this field investigates how these microscopic organisms interact with us and each other, driving everything from disease outbreaks to beneficial fermentation processes. Understanding them is crucial for developing new medicines, improving food safety, and combating global health challenges.
At Gist.Science, we make the latest discoveries in this dynamic field accessible to everyone. We process every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category, transforming dense academic findings into both clear, plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries. This ensures that whether you are a student, a researcher, or simply curious, you can grasp the significance of cutting-edge science without getting lost in jargon.
Below are the most recent papers in microbiology, curated and summarized directly from the bioRxiv server to keep you at the forefront of discovery.
Serial passage of the beneficial bacterium *Pseudomonas protegens* CHA0 through insect larvae did not compromise its multi-host lifestyle or biocontrol capabilities, demonstrating that its ability to protect plants and kill insects remains stable even after forced adaptation to an insect-only environment.
This study demonstrates that Type 2 diabetes exacerbates vaginal Group B Streptococcus colonization in mice by impairing the mucosal pro-inflammatory cytokine response, particularly IL-1, which can be reversed by local IL-1 supplementation to resolve the infection.
This study identifies the female-enriched gut bacterium *Eggerthella lenta* as a causal driver of neuroinflammation and multiple sclerosis severity in women by activating the host receptor TLR2 to induce IFN-γ production, thereby elucidating a key mechanism behind sex differences in autoimmunity.
This study demonstrates that while broad-spectrum CDK inhibitors consistently suppress gammaherpesvirus reactivation and replication, targeted CDK 4/6 inhibitors exhibit stage-dependent effects that decrease reactivation when administered concurrently but increase it when given prior to induction, suggesting their therapeutic potential for virus-associated cancers depends critically on treatment timing.
This paper introduces BertMS, a transformer-based framework that significantly improves spectral similarity estimation and molecular networking for the dereplication of unknown compounds in metabolomics by learning contextualized representations of fragment ions from large-scale MS/MS data.
This study demonstrates that the unfolded protein response regulator HAC1 is essential for *Candida auris* stress adaptation and virulence, as its unconventional splicing facilitates survival under ER and heat stress, while its deletion significantly reduces fungal burden and host mortality in infection models.
The study demonstrates that the extremotolerant rock-inhabiting fungus *Knufia petricola* modulates its growth, morphology, and biomass composition in response to carbon and nitrogen availability, switching to an explorative, filamentous growth strategy under nutrient limitation to reveal universal fungal resource-acquisition patterns.
This study demonstrates that while gene duplication-amplification in *Enterobacter cloacae* provides a dose-dependent survival advantage against ceftazidime, it imposes a physiological growth cost in the absence of antibiotics and paradoxically increases susceptibility to rapid killing at supra-MIC concentrations, highlighting the context-dependent trade-offs of this resistance mechanism.
This study demonstrates that *Rhodococcus* sp. ASF-10, a bacterium isolated from the Atlantic salmon gut, can biodegrade low molecular weight, oxidized polyethylene derivatives through specific enzymatic pathways, offering potential for sustainable bioremediation strategies.
This paper presents a novel, efficient plasmid-based reverse genetics system for Murine Norovirus that utilizes vaccinia virus capping enzymes (D1R and D12L) and T7 RNA polymerase to significantly enhance viral rescue titers and polyprotein abundance in mammalian cells, offering a robust platform for high-throughput viral mutant analysis.