Molecular methods are increasingly used to identify pathogens that are difficult to cultivate. We report a case of disseminated infection with "Mycobacterium tilburgii," a proposed species that has never been cultivated. The case illustrates the diagnostic utility of sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene directly from clinical specimens.

The development of novel anti-bacterial treatment strategies will be aided by an increased understanding of the interactions that take place between bacteria and host cells during infection. Global expression profiling using microarray technologies can help to describe and define the mechanisms required by bacterial pathogens to cause disease and the host responses required to defeat bacterial ...

The principles obtained from studies on molecular chaperones have provided explanations for the assisted protein folding in vivo. However, the majority of proteins can fold without the assistance of the known molecular chaperones, and little attention has been paid to the potential chaperoning roles of other macromolecules. During protein biogenesis and folding, newly synthesized polypeptide ch...

Infectious disease introduction in the Americas has been approached in historical, not biological, terms. We believe that this historical focus has limited scholarly understanding of Native American disease experience, past and present. Our goal is to link disease contact and contemporary Native American biology. We review the historical debates, and argue that advances in evolutionary theory a...

Identifying the molecular targets for the beneficial or detrimental effects of small-molecule drugs is an important and currently unmet challenge. We have developed a method, drug affinity responsive target stability (DARTS), which takes advantage of a reduction in the protease susceptibility of the target protein upon drug binding. DARTS is universally applicable because it requires no modific...

Soil microbial populations are immersed in a framework of interactions known to affect plant fitness and soil quality. They are involved in fundamental activities that ensure the stability and productivity of both agricultural systems and natural ecosystems. Strategic and applied research has demonstrated that certain co-operative microbial activities can be exploited, as a low-input biotechnol...

The Harary index H can be viewed as a molecular structure descriptor composed of increments representing interactions between pairs of atoms, such that their magnitude decreases with the increasing distance between the respective two atoms. A generalization of the Harary index, denoted by Hk, is achieved by employing the Steiner-type distance between k-tuples of atoms. We show that the linear c...