Listeria monocytogenes is a food-borne Gram positive bacteria that causes the infection listeriosis. It is responsible for serious clinical manifestations including gastroenteritis, and meningitis and encephalitis in newborns, with 20 to 30 % of clinical infections resulting in death. It is a facultative intracellular pathogen that can invade and move within eukaryotic cells by polymerization […]
Bacteria are the workhorses for a large number of biotechnological processes. From different fermentation processes to insulin production, they are widely used in industry due to their efficiency, fast duplication times and ease of maintenance. But often their behaviour it´s much more complex than one would expect from a unicellular organism. This is where the […]
Few weeks ago, a new report by WHO reveals that antibiotic resistance is now a major threat to global public health: “ the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era ”. One of the priorities is the treatment of urinary tract infections caused by Escherichia coli strains isolated from several countries and which are resistant […]
Tuberculosis (TB) represents a serious public health problem. The latest reports estimate an incidence of 8.7 million cases in 2001 and over 1.4 million deaths per year. The disease is usually be treated with a first-line drugs, isoniazid and rifampin, the two most potent anti-tuberculosis agents. However, the prevalence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis cause by […]
Since the emergence of the microscope in the early seventeenth century, many claimed its invention, but many more have tried to improve it. Many problems have been resolved on the way, allowing us to poke directly with our own eyes about the heart of the living or inert matter as far as optical physics allows […]
It is common to think that sci-fi writers are extremely creative and smart when they depict alien creatures with weird (and usually disgusting) ways of reproducing, generally using for this purpose the bodies of incautious and often naïve human characters. And they truly are that creative and imaginative, I’m not going to take that credit […]
In biology few issues are as basic as the division and classification of living things. Despite the differences shown by taxa that occupy each of the categories, all living things have a common ancestor and characteristics that unite them. Since Linnaeus (in 1735) to the newest division created by Cavalier-Smith (in the late twentieth century) […]