Promiscuous bacteria have staying power

An insight article with Ruth Massey on John Lees' and Stephen Bentley's new paper was published in eLife on Friday:

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a notorious bacterial pathogen hiding in plain sight. A common resident of the nose and throat, between 68% and 84% of young infants will carry this species at any given time (Turner et al., 2012). In most cases it causes no harm, yet the presence of pneumococci – as the bacteria are known – can predispose a person to life-threatening infections like pneumonia or meningitis. Indeed, pneumococci are responsible for around 10% of all deaths in young children around the world (O'Brien et al., 2009), with the vast majority of cases being in developing countries.
Research into S. pneumoniae is complicated because the species is a patchwork of distinctive strains and some of these strains remain in the nose and throat for longer than others. Now, in eLife, John Lees and Stephen Bentley – both at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute – and colleagues report that strains rendered impotent by a virus do not linger for as long as other strains (Lees et al., 2017).

Click here to read the full piece.

New Journal: Microbial Genomics

This week sees the launch of Microbial Genomics, a new open access journal from the Society for General Microbiology. Here's an excerpt from the journal's mission statement:

"Microbial Genomics (MGen) publishes high quality, original research on archaea, bacteria, microbial eukaryotes and viruses. MGen welcomes papers that use genomic approaches to understand microbial evolution, population genomics and phylogeography, outbreaks and epidemiological investigations, impact of climate or changing niche, metagenomic and whole transcriptome studies, and bioinformatic analysis covering the breadth of microbiology, from clinically important pathogens to microbial life in diverse ecosystems."

The journal, whose tag line is Bases to Biology, will publish microbiological discoveries and innovations in research methods and bioinformatics. The journal is headed by renowned Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute scientists Stephen Bentley and Nicholas Thompson with an impressive editorial board that I joined earlier this year. Article processing charges have been waived during the journal's launch year - so get in there fast!