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In the Kroo Bay Slum in Sierra Leone, life expectancy was 35 years – and then Ebola hit. It was in that neighborhood that Nicole, a 31-year-old CDC communications expert deployed to fight the epidemic, saw what she was up against.

With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, even common infections that were easily controlled for decades -- such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections -- are proving trickier to treat with standard antibiotics. New drugs are desperately needed, but so are ways to maximize the effective lifespan of these drugs. To accomplish that, Duke University researchers used software they developed to predict a constantly-evolving infectious bacterium's countermoves to one of these new drugs ahead of time, before the drug is even tested on patients.

New research findings point toward a class of compounds that could be effective in combating infections caused by enterovirus D68, which has stricken children with serious respiratory infections and might be associated with polio-like symptoms in the United States and elsewhere.

Cholera is caused when the bacterium Vibrio cholerae infects the small intestine. The disease is characterized by acute watery diarrhea resulting in severe dehydration. EPFL scientists have now demonstrated that V. cholerae uses a tiny spear to stab and kill neighboring bacteria -- even of its own kind -- and then steal their DNA. This mechanism, known as "horizontal gene transfer," allows the cholera bacterium to become more virulent by absorbing the traits of its prey. The study is published in the journal Science.