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Lukas VFN 🇪🇺

Historical outbreaks of #CoffeeWilt disease linked to gene transfer from another fungus phys.org/news/2024-12-historic

Horizontal transfers between fungal #Fusarium species contributed to successive outbreaks of #coffee wilt disease: Lily Peck et al. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/

"The #fungus that causes coffee wilt disease repeatedly took up segments of DNA from a related fungal pathogen, which contributed to successive outbreaks of the disease."

unhealthy looking plant leaves
#Fungi#PlantPathology#LGT
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Brian Small

.> Yet wrapped up in penicillin’s serendipitous beginnings were hints of challenges to come. “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them,” Fleming warned in 1945 when he received the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, together with Florey and Chain, “and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.”
.> His remarks proved ominously prescient: penicillin-resistant strains of S. aureus began appearing in hospitals just years after the drug was introduced.
...
.> But even Fleming did not anticipate the magnitude of the resistance problem to come. In the 1950s, amid postwar outbreaks of dysentery, Japanese researchers led by Tsutomu Watanabe began to encounter bacteria simultaneously resistant to multiple drugs—impossibly unlikely for pathogens acquiring random mutations. By 1955, researchers were reporting several strains of Shigella dysenteriae resistant to the same four antibiotics at once. Even worse, the resistance itself was contagious. Related species, when mixed with multidrug-resistant S. dysenteriae, also became resistant to multiple antibiotics.
.> “Resistance works differently in the bacterium,” explains Stuart Levy
- https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2014/05/superbug
#AlexanderFleming #Penicillin #TsutomuWatanabe #WatanabeTsutomu #StuartLevy #Antibiotics #AntibioticResistnace #HGT #HorizontalGeneTransfer
Harvard MagazineSuperbug: An Epidemic BeginsAs antibiotic resistance spreads, scientists and doctors race time.
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Small Things Considered

Gene Transfer in the Ocean

by Mechas
When it comes to generating variability in genes and functions, microbes are at the top of the list. Much of their genome plasticity and capacity to adapt to changing environments is driven by horizontal gene transfer (HGT), the acquisition of genetic information from other cells rather than from vertical inheritance upon division.

Read more → schaechter.asmblog.org/schaech

Transmission electron microscope (TEM) image of Prochlorococcus marinus with overlay green coloring. [source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prochlorococcus#/media/File:Prochlorococcus_marinus.jpg]
#microbiology#HGT
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Michael Brockhurst

Exciting new paper in @PLOSBiology — we show that plasmids use translational global regulators to rewire host cells including expression of key ecological traits, like metabolism and motility, whilst also boosting horizontal transmission of the plasmid

This was a big collaborative effort with colleagues at John Innes Centre, Birmingham, Sheffield & Liverpool

#plasmid #HGT #MobileGeneticElements

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/

journals.plos.orgPlasmids manipulate bacterial behaviour through translational regulatory crosstalkPlasmids contain homologs of bacterial signaling proteins and use them to manipulate host cells to their benefit. This study describes a widespread plasmid-borne translational regulator that subverts ecological traits in soil bacteria, inducing community organization and promoting plasmid transmission.
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