It was long thought that when the membrane of a cell lost its integrity and broke down, the cell would die; cells cannot survive without a cell wall. Many antibiotics target the cell wall of bacteria, ...

Bacteria are evolving to elude our drugs at an alarming rate, so much so that the UN has declared antibiotic resistance a global health emergency with the expectation that it could kill millions upon ...

For bacteria, the first line of defense is the cell wall, which keeps toxins such as antibiotics out. Now, researchers have discovered a key mechanism that bacteria use to build their cell walls, ...

Focusing on the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, new research led by scientists from the University of Sheffield in the U.K., examines how bacteria maintain their unique cell walls and how ...

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden published a study “Breaking barriers: pCF10 type 4 secretion system relies on a self-regulating muramidase to modulate the cell wall” in mBIO that describes ...

The bacterial cell wall must be constantly remodeled in order to grow and divide. This involves the close coordination of lytic enzymes and peptidoglycan synthesis. Researchers led by Martin ...

In tight spaces that trap most microbes, one bacterium keeps moving by reconfiguring how it swims, revealing a new biological ...

We still do not understand exactly how antibiotics kill bacteria. However, this understanding is necessary if we want to develop new antibiotics. And that is precisely what is urgently needed, because ...

If you have had strep throat or an ear infection, there's a good chance you received amoxicillin or penicillin to effectively kill the troublesome bacteria. These drugs, which belong to a broad group ...

Textbook images show peptidoglycan as straight and ordered. The biopolymer peptidoglycan that makes up bacterial cell walls was always assumed to be highly ordered. Textbook images like the one below ...