Trends in MicrobiologyPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-07-20DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2024.06.007
Rachel K Meade, Clare M Smith
{"title":"Immunological roads diverged: mapping tuberculosis outcomes in mice.","authors":"Rachel K Meade, Clare M Smith","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.06.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.06.007","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The journey from phenotypic observation to causal genetic mechanism is a long and challenging road. For pathogens like Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), which causes tuberculosis (TB), host-pathogen coevolution has spanned millennia, costing millions of human lives. Mammalian models can systematically recapitulate host genetic variation, producing a spectrum of disease outcomes. Leveraging genome sequences and deep phenotyping data from infected mouse genetic reference populations (GRPs), quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping approaches have successfully identified host genomic regions associated with TB phenotypes. Here, we review the ongoing optimization of QTL mapping study design alongside advances in mouse GRPs. These next-generation resources and approaches have enabled identification of novel host-pathogen interactions governing one of the most prevalent infectious diseases in the world today.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":"15-33"},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141735109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Trends in MicrobiologyPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-09-05DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.002
Gui Araujo, José M Montoya, Torsten Thomas, Nicole S Webster, Miguel Lurgi
{"title":"A mechanistic framework for complex microbe-host symbioses.","authors":"Gui Araujo, José M Montoya, Torsten Thomas, Nicole S Webster, Miguel Lurgi","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Virtually all multicellular organisms on Earth live in symbiotic associations with complex microbial communities: the microbiome. This ancient relationship is of fundamental importance for both the host and the microbiome. Recently, the analyses of numerous microbiomes have revealed an incredible diversity and complexity of symbionts, with different mechanisms identified as potential drivers of this diversity. However, the interplay of ecological and evolutionary forces generating these complex associations is still poorly understood. Here we explore and summarise the suite of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms identified as relevant to different aspects of microbiome complexity and diversity. We argue that microbiome assembly is a dynamic product of ecology and evolution at various spatio-temporal scales. We propose a theoretical framework to classify mechanisms and build mechanistic host-microbiome models to link them to empirical patterns. We develop a cohesive foundation for the theoretical understanding of the combined effects of ecology and evolution on the assembly of complex symbioses.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":"96-111"},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142146319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Trends in MicrobiologyPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-10-04DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.009
Lexi Mollica, Meghan Craughwell, Jackie Goordial
{"title":"Transitioning ecosystems: how will permafrost cryophiles respond to a changing climate?","authors":"Lexi Mollica, Meghan Craughwell, Jackie Goordial","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.08.009","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Permafrost harbours a diversity of cryophilic microorganisms that can be metabolically active at sub-zero temperatures and likely play a role in global carbon cycling. This forum article explores possible impacts of permafrost warming on cold-adapted microbiota, highlights underexplored areas of research, and suggests future short and long-term research foci.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":"4-6"},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142378340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Trends in MicrobiologyPub Date : 2025-01-01Epub Date: 2024-08-19DOI: 10.1016/j.tim.2024.07.009
Davide Roncarati, Andrea Vannini, Vincenzo Scarlato
{"title":"Temperature sensing and virulence regulation in pathogenic bacteria.","authors":"Davide Roncarati, Andrea Vannini, Vincenzo Scarlato","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.07.009","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.07.009","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pathogenic bacteria can detect a variety of environmental signals, including temperature changes. While sudden and significant temperature variations act as danger signals that trigger a protective heat-shock response, minor temperature fluctuations typically signal to the pathogen that it has moved from one environment to another, such as entering a specific niche within a host during infection. These latter temperature fluctuations are utilized by pathogens to coordinate the expression of crucial virulence factors. Here, we elucidate the critical role of temperature in governing the expression of virulence factors in bacterial pathogens. Moreover, we outline the molecular mechanisms used by pathogens to detect temperature fluctuations, focusing on systems that employ proteins and nucleic acids as sensory devices. We also discuss the potential implications and the extent of the risk that climate change poses to human pathogenic diseases.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":"66-79"},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142009516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deciphering bacterial protein functions with innovative computational methods.","authors":"Shani Cheskis, Avital Akerman, Asaf Levy","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.013","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Bacteria colonize every niche on Earth and play key roles in many environmental and host-associated processes. The sequencing revolution revealed the remarkable bacterial genetic and proteomic diversity and the genomic content of cultured and uncultured bacteria. However, deciphering functions of novel proteins remains a high barrier, often preventing the deep understanding of microbial life and its interaction with the surrounding environment. In recent years, exciting new bioinformatic tools, many of which are based on machine learning, facilitate the challenging task of gene and protein function discovery in the era of big genomics data, leading to the generation of testable hypotheses for bacterial protein functions. The new tools allow prediction of protein structures and interactions and allow sensitive and efficient sequence- and structure-based searching and clustering. Here, we summarize some of these recent tools which revolutionize modern microbiology research, along with examples for their usage, emphasizing the user-friendly, web-based ones. Adoption of these capabilities by experimentalists and computational biologists could save resources and accelerate microbiology research.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142907676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anvita U Kerkar, Kelly R Sutherland, Anne W Thompson
{"title":"Non-viral predators of marine picocyanobacteria.","authors":"Anvita U Kerkar, Kelly R Sutherland, Anne W Thompson","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Earth's most abundant photosynthetic cells, the picocyanobacteria - Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus - play a fundamental global role in aquatic ecosystems. The success of these picocyanobacteria is interpreted through a cross-scale systems framework that integrates bottom-up controls on growth (e.g., nutrients and light), diversity, and the selective pressures and response to predation. While viral predators are well studied and experimentally tractable, the diverse non-viral predators of picocyanobacteria are disconnected from this framework and experimentally challenging, leaving a major gap in understanding the picocyanobacteria. This review presents existing research on non-viral picocyanobacterial predators and promising research frontiers that will expand knowledge of the ecology and evolution of these crucial microorganisms.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142872877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher James Barnes, Mo Bahram, Mogens Nicolaisen, M Thomas P Gilbert, Mette Vestergård
{"title":"Microbiome selection and evolution within wild and domesticated plants.","authors":"Christopher James Barnes, Mo Bahram, Mogens Nicolaisen, M Thomas P Gilbert, Mette Vestergård","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.011","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Microbes are ubiquitously found across plant surfaces and even within their cells, forming the plant microbiome. Many of these microbes contribute to the functioning of the host and consequently affect its fitness. Therefore, in many contexts, including microbiome effects enables a better understanding of the phenotype of the plant rather than considering the genome alone. Changes in the microbiome composition are also associated with changes in the functioning of the host, and there has been considerable focus on how environmental variables regulate plant microbiomes. More recently, studies suggest that the host genome also preconditions the microbiome to the environment of the plant, and the microbiome is therefore subject to evolutionary forces. Here, we outline how plant microbiomes are governed by both environmental variables and evolutionary processes and how they can regulate plant health together.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142865460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The exometabolome as a hidden driver of bacterial virulence and pathogenesis.","authors":"Saurabh Chugh, Fabien Létisse, Olivier Neyrolles","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.009","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The traditional view of metabolism as merely supplying energy and biosynthetic precursors is undergoing a paradigm shift. Metabolic dynamics not only regulates gene expression but also orchestrates cellular processes with remarkable precision. Most bacterial pathogens exhibit exceptional metabolic plasticity, enabling them to adapt to diverse environments, including hostile conditions within a host. While the role of intracellular bacterial metabolism in pathogen-host interactions has been extensively studied, the contributions of the extracellularly released or secreted bacterial metabolites (referred to here as the bacterial 'exometabolome') to metabolic adaptations and disease pathogenesis remain largely unexplored. In this review, we highlight the significant and intriguing roles of bacterial exometabolomes in drug tolerance, immune suppression, and disease pathogenesis, opening a new frontier in our understanding of bacterial-host interactions.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142865493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gathsaurie Neelika Malavige, Guruprasad R Medigeshi, R Tedjo Sasmono, Chanaki Amaratunga
{"title":"Funding and collaboration inequalities in infectious disease research - why does it matter?","authors":"Gathsaurie Neelika Malavige, Guruprasad R Medigeshi, R Tedjo Sasmono, Chanaki Amaratunga","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.006","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>To face the current and emerging challenges due to infectious diseases, global research communities must comprehend the challenges faced by scientists in low-income and lower-middle-income countries. Here we address pertinent issues regarding funding and collaboration inequalities that could potentially cripple economic and healthcare systems, escalating to bigger global threats.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142822710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The sticky business of Alphavirus capsid-host interactions.","authors":"Caroline K Martin, Peiqi Yin, Margaret Kielian","doi":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.tim.2024.11.003","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Alphaviruses are a serious threat to global health and can cause lethal encephalitic or arthritogenic disease in humans and animals. As there are no licensed antivirals, it is critical to improve our understanding of alphavirus interactions with the host cell. Here, we focus on the essential alphavirus protein capsid. While its roles in genome packaging and virus assembly have been wellstudied, much less is known about capsid's interactions with host proteins and their functional relevance for infection. Recently, several new capsid interactor candidates were identified, collectively emphasising the complexity of capsid-host biology. In this review we summarise these novel interactor candidates, highlight capsid's emerging role in immune evasion, and discuss the challenges and opportunities arising from capsid-host interactions.</p>","PeriodicalId":23275,"journal":{"name":"Trends in Microbiology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":14.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142813732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}