Professor Shannon Sirk (MME) received the NIH NIBIB R21 Trailblazer Award for her ongoing work in engineering both microbes and antibodies for human therapies. This three-year, $400,000 award is designed to help engineers pursue research programs at the interface of the life sciences, engineering, and physical sciences.
An Illinois research team is developing a method of producing and delivering monoclonal antibody treatments for breast cancer through commensal microbes in the gut. If successful, this approach could increase accessibility and dramatically decrease the cost of monoclonal antibodies.
Microbial communities often contain several species that coexist even though they share similar metabolic abilities. How they do so is unclear. Researchers have now developed a model to show that if these species have complementary preferences for what they consume, they can more easily coexist.
The era of COVID-19 and the need to constantly wash one's hands and sanitize things have brought microbes to new levels of scrutiny, particularly for their impact on an individual's health.
While associations between microbes and their hosts, from the beneficial - think probiotics in yogurt - to the harmful - such as with viruses spread by touch - have long been known, little is known about how microbes evolve and how their evolution affects the health of their hosts.
Bacteria in the human body are sharing genes with one another at a higher rate than is typically seen in nature, and some of those genes appear to be traveling – independent of their microbial hosts – from one part of the body to another, researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports.
Inside the microbial communities that populate our world, microbes are fighting for their lives.
These tiny organisms are in the soil, in the oceans, and in the human body. Microbes play several important roles – they can decompose waste, make oxygen and promote human health.
Within communities, microbes constantly compete with each other for space, nutrients and other resources. Their competitions can occur across multiple spatial scales, whether the microbes are close together or far apart.
Changing the way microbes are classified can reveal similarities among mammals’ gut microbiomes, according to a new study.
The study, published in mBio, proposed an alternative method for classifying microbes that provides insight into human and environmental health.
James O’Dwyer, an associate professor of plant biology and member of the IGB's Biocomplexity research theme, is a co-author of the study, which was funded by the NSF.
The microbes could surrender to the harmless virus, but instead freeze in place, dormant, waiting for their potential predator to go away, according to a recent study in mBio.
University of Illinois researchers found that Sulfolobus islandicus can go dormant, ceasing to grow and reproduce, in order to protect themselves from infection by Sulfolobus spindle-shaped virus 9 (SSV9). The dormant microbes are able to recover if the virus goes away within 24 to 48 hours—otherwise they die.
Researchers report in the journal Nature that they have made a breakthrough in understanding how a powerful antibiotic agent is made in nature. Their discovery solves a decades-old mystery, and opens up new avenues of research into thousands of similar molecules, many of which are likely to be medically useful.
Halomonas are a hardy breed of bacteria. They can withstand heat, high salinity, low oxygen, utter darkness and pressures that would kill most other organisms. These traits enable these microbes to eke out a living in deep sandstone formations that also happen to be useful for hydrocarbon extraction and carbon sequestration, researchers report in a new study.
