Microbes

Everybody from NASA to David Bowie has wondered if there’s life on Mars – and now we might have a precise place to look for it. A new Caltech study has shown that photosynthetic microbes could thrive in a small habitable zone beneath the ice.

It's super-sustainable, easily made and nutrient-dense. And it puts all other food production to shame. Now, the first air-protein factory is open. It's the food of the future, and soon a $100 million industry – but will you be putting it on your plate?

It may not be to everyone's taste, but kombucha tea may be able to deliver the benefits of fasting, without the hardest part – the fasting. Its yeast and bacteria altered fat metabolism, without any other dietary changes, resulting in lower fat stores.

We might find alien life as soon as 2030, suggests a new study. A lab experiment has shown instruments on a spacecraft headed to one of the most promising worlds to find life are sensitive enough to detect a single living cell in a single ice grain.

Using an AI-based approach, researchers found a better way to create the drug galantamine, commonly prescribed to people suffering from Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. The fermentation-based technique could boost the drug's availability.

Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and a whole host of others. Now, Stanford scientists have discovered an entirely new class of biological entities inside us, which they’ve ominously named “Obelisks.”

Researchers identified 317 million gene clusters belonging to oceanic microbes, creating the world’s largest open-source catalog that offers a tool for exploring how these genetic resources could be used in medicine, energy, food and other industries.

Researchers have developed a ‘smart tweezer’ that can pluck a specific bacterial strain from a microbiome of trillions and sequence its genome better than current methods allow. The tool could lead to breakthroughs in disease diagnosis and treatment.

The human body's microbe makeup is increasingly linked to the onset of many diseases, with a lot of the focus on the gut. A new study, however, has found that changes in the bug populations in not just the gut but in salivary and urinary microbiomes are linked to kidney stones forming.

Just like any other organisms, crop-destroying soil microbes die if they get too hot. With that fact in mind, scientists have developed a new system in which soil-heating microwaves are used to kill such pests. It could one day replace pesticides.

Hospitals are meant to heal people, but patients often pick up superbugs during their stay. Scientists have now developed long-lasting antimicrobial coatings for textiles that could allow hospital curtains to quickly kill viruses and bacteria.

A 15-year project trying to build a synthetic yeast genome has hit a major milestone – yeast cells with more than 50% synthetic DNA for the first time. The team created synthetic versions of almost all its chromosomes plus a completely new one.