Bacterial stress response

Bacteria have to deal with stress too and to cope with them, they activate a bacterial stress response! Bacteria encounter some of these stresses when they make their way into our bodies. These can include changing temperature, pH, or food availability.

 

Creating the colours of the rainbow: Bacteria and the vibrant world of pigments

Our world as well as the bacterial world are full of vibrant colours. These colours exist thanks to biopigments; molecules able to capture light and reflect the corresponding colour. Many organisms, as well as bacteria, learned to use biopigments to harvest energy from sunlight, fight foes and adapt to new and challenging environments. Read on to learn what makes the bacterial world so colourful and why biopigments are the Earth’s life savers.

How bacteria gain energy from cellular respiration to fuel life

To gain energy, all organisms – including bacteria – need to break molecules apart to get their electrons. In bacteria, this process is called bacterial respiration. Here, we will look at where this energy is stored, what bacteria do with both the electrons and energy and how we use bacterial respiration for our own advantages.

How bacteria fight off viruses

Bacteria are constantly attacked by other microbes like viruses. But also bacteria developed mechanisms that make them immune to viral intruders. Read on to find out how bacteria fight off viruses to protect themselves and the whole bacterial community.

Bacteria wrap themselves in their swimming flagella

Bacteria swim through liquids with their flagella. Some bacteria even have two flagella at opposite ends that help them to swim through mucus and slime. This movement helps bacteria to infect the human body. Now, researchers start to better understand how these flagella work together to move the bacterium forward.

transciption in bacteria

Bacteria destroy proteins to understand the environment

For a bacterium to understand what is going on in the environment, it needs some sophisticated mechanisms. One of these includes destroying proteins. Here, we will look at why bacteria destroy proteins and how it helps them to survive.

Phages form nets around bacteria to separate them from the environment and protect from toxic compounds.

Love thy host: Phages protect bacteria from antibiotics

The players in the microbial world always interact with each other driving ecology and evolution forward. Bacteriophages thank their bacterial hosts for their production in a very special way: They protect bacteria from antibiotic attacks by forming shielding walls around the cells. While the microbial world gets more and more complex with such mechanisms, it also represents another strategy for antimicrobial resistances.

Chromombacterium transports violacein within outer membrane vesicles to kill other bacteria

Bacteria firing toxic bubbles

Bacteria can form outer membrane vesicles and fill them with antibiotics. They then send these toxic bubbles off to kill competing bacteria.

Vibrio bacteria use their T6SS killing machine for movement or DNA uptake.

Should I kill or should I go? Bacteria making decisions

Bacteria have powerful killing machines with which they carve out their own niches. To kill competitors, bacteria from the Vibrio family, have a powerful crossbow and its arrows availble. However, these bacteria can decide whether they risk a kill and take up what’s left of the dead prey or they escape the dangerous situation. Here, we look at how bacteria decide to kill or flee.

Invasive bacteria use attachment tools like pili and adhesins to adhere to cells

How bacteria get (too) attached

Pathogenic bacteria developed different mechanisms to attach to human host cells. However, our immune system learned to fight back, so that a constant battle between bacteria and host is happening in our bodies.

Multidrug resistant bacteria have many different ways of dealing with antibiotics

About antimicrobial resistance mechanisms

Bacteria developed different antimicrobial resistance mechanisms to get rid of antibiotics. Here, you will learn what bacteria do with antibiotics so that they don’t harm them and what superbugs are.

Regulatory circuit of how bacteria sense environmental signals. Membrane bound anti-sigma factor releases a sigma factor into the cytosol after signal binding which modifies gene expression

How bacteria sense iron in their environment

Bacteria sense iron in the environment via proteins that are transporters and receptors in one. The transporter imports iron, while the receptor tells the bacterium that iron is present on the outside. This activates a whole circuit so that the bacterium produces more transporters to capture as much iron as possible.