Quorum sensing (QS) is a communication mechanism between bacteria that allows specific
processes to be controlled, such as biofilm formation, virulence factor expression, production …

Bacterial virulence is highly dynamic and context-dependent. For this reason, it is
challenging to predict how molecular changes affect the growth of a pathogen in a host and …

Bacterial sphingomyelinases and phospholipases are a heterogeneous group of esterases
which are usually surface associated or secreted by a wide variety of Gram-positive and …

Laboratory experiments show that social interactions between bacterial cells can drive
evolutionary change at the population level, but significant challenges limit attempts to …

Bacterial infections of the cornea, or bacterial keratitis (BK), are notorious for causing rapidly
fulminant disease and permanent vision loss, even among treated patients. In the last sixty …

Bacterial cooperation can be disrupted by non-producers that can profit from public goods
without paying their production cost. A cheater can increase in frequency, exhausting the …

Intestinal inflammation fuels the transmission of Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Tm). However,
a substantial fitness cost is associated with virulence expression. Mutations inactivating …

Type III secretion systems (T3SS) are widely distributed in Gram-negative microorganisms
and critical for host-pathogen and host-symbiont interactions with plants and animals …

Background Ixodes scapularis is the predominant tick vector of Borrelia burgdorferi, the
agent of Lyme disease, in the USA. Molecular interactions between the tick and B …

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is internalized into multiple types of epithelial cell in vitro and in
vivo and yet is often regarded as an exclusively extracellular pathogen. Paradoxically, ExoS …