News

Suicide allows bacteria found in opportunistic infections to create an antibiotic tolerant biofilm, according to a team including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). In work recently published in Current Biology, the researchers found that a molecule secreted by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes a breakdown in the respiratory chain, killing some of the population and triggering the creation of a biofilm among survivors, and thus conferring increased tolerance to antibiotics.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool and the King's Sierra Leone Partnership are to present new findings into post-Ebola syndrome at a major European conference this week.

Sepsis represents a serious complication of infection and is one of the leading causes of death and critical illness worldwide due in part to the lack of effective therapies. A report in the American Journal of Pathology provides evidence from both mouse and human studies that SHARPIN, a protein involved in regulating inflammation, has anti-septic effects. These findings may spur development of novel sepsis treatments.

A new study suggests that Neanderthals across Europe may well have been infected with diseases carried out of Africa by waves of anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens. As both were species of hominin, it would have been easier for pathogens to jump populations, say researchers. This might have contributed to the demise of Neanderthals.

Brazilian researchers from the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) have demonstrated the harmful effects of Zika virus (ZIKV) in human neural stem cells, neurospheres and brain organoids. Since ZIKV has been gradually established as a direct cause of central nervous system malformations, this study help to elucidate the etiological nature of the recently increasing number of microcephaly cases in Brazil.

The recent epidemic of Zika virus infections in South and Latin America has raised serious concerns on its ramifications for the population in the Americas and spread of the virus worldwide. The Zika virus disease is a relatively new phenomenon for which sufficient and comprehensive data and investigative reports have not been available to date. Although first recognized as a new virus in 1947 in Uganda's Zika forest animals, its debilitating effect on human fetuses leading to babies being born with smaller braincases (microcephaly) was not known or well investigated until its epidemic form in Yap Island, Micronesia, in 2013 and now in the South American countries in 2015-16. The concern is so high that public health authorities in some countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Jamaica have asked their women to avoid pregnancies until the virus is better understood. The World Health Organization (WHO) has labeled the outbreak of such abnormalities as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Enrollment has begun in the first of two multinational clinical trials of an intravenously delivered investigational antibody for preventing HIV infection. Known as the AMP Studies, for antibody-mediated prevention, the trials will test whether giving people an investigational anti-HIV antibody called VRC01 as an intravenous infusion every 8 weeks is safe, tolerable and effective at preventing HIV infection. With a projected enrollment of 4,200 adults, the trials also are designed to answer fundamental scientific questions for the fields of HIV prevention and vaccine research.

In humans, cholera is among the world’s most deadly diseases, killing as many as 140,000 persons a year, according to World Health Organization statistics. But in aquatic environments far away from humans, the same bacterium attacks neighboring microbes with a toxic spear – and often steals DNA from other microorganisms to expand its own capabilities.

With Canadian government funding, a team of innovators from Canada and Mexico have successfully tested a low cost, environmentally-friendly way of destroying the eggs of the mosquito genus that spreads dengue, and likely spreading the Zika virus.

Griffith University's Institute for Glycomics has made a promising discovery in the treatment and prevention of human parainfluenza virus. Institute director Mark von Itzstein and his team have shown that two existing drugs readily available on the market can work together to more effectively treat the virus.