Iron is both an essential cofactor of many enzymes and a producer of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals that can cause cellular damage. To regulate the supply of intracellular iron, cells have developed protein-based organelles, like ferritins, that act as iron storage containers. Myxococcus xanthus, a soil-dwelling gram-negative myxobacterium, produces another type of protein-based organelle th...

Lysed areas suggestive of phage activity were observed on a plate in the course of isolation of a strain of Chondrococcus columnaris from trout at the Fisheries Center of the University of Washington. C. columnaris is an aquatic fruiting myxobacterium responsible for epizootics in salmonid and other fishes (Ordal and Rucker, 1944). Subsequently a bacteriophage was isolated which infected and ly...

Marine myxobacteria (Enhygromyxa, Plesiocystis, Pseudoenhygromyxa, Haliangium) are phylogenetically distant from their terrestrial counterparts. Salimabromide is the first natural product from the Plesiocystis/Enhygromyxa clade of obligatory marine myxobacteria. Salimabromide has a new tetracyclic carbon skeleton, comprising a brominated benzene ring, a furano lactone residue, and a cyclohexane...

In 1922 Davis described an infectious disease which was responsible for heavy mortalities in a number of species of warm water fishes in the Mississippi Valley. Although Davis was unsuccessful in his attempts to cultivate the etiological agent, he reported that large numbers of slender, motile bacteria were characteristically present in the lesions of infected fish. He further noted that when m...

Lysed areas suggestive of phage activity were observed on a plate in the course of isolation of a strain of Chondrococcus columnaris from trout at the Fisheries Center of the University of Washington. C. columnaris is an aquatic fruiting myxobacterium responsible for epizootics in salmonid and other fishes (Ordal and Rucker, 1944). Subsequently a bacteriophage was isolated which infected and ly...

The gram-negative myxobacterium Myxococcus xanthus is equipped with an interesting motility system that allows it to reverse direction on average every 8 minutes by switching the construction of two motility engines at the ends of this rod-shaped bacterium. While the mechanisms responsible for timing and engine construction/deconstruction are relatively well understood, there are several compet...

Machine learning has been used for estimation of potential energy surfaces to speed up molecular dynamics simulations of small systems. We demonstrate that this approach is feasible for significantly larger, structurally complex molecules, taking the natural product Archazolid A, a potent inhibitor of vacuolar-type ATPase, from the myxobacterium Archangium gephyra as an example. Our model estim...