, January 28, 2026
Regulation of extracellular vesicles for protein secretion in <i>Aspergillus nidulans</i>

Regulation of extracellular vesicles for protein secretion in Aspergillus nidulans

Rebekkah E. Pope1, Patrick Ballmann2, Lisa Whitworth3 and Rolf A. Prade1,*

This study reveals that Aspergillus nidulans boosts extracellular vesicle production when ER-trafficked enzymes are induced, uncovering how fungi remodel their secretome through vesicle-mediated secretion to adapt to changing environments and biofilm formation.

January 23, 2026
Transcriptomic response to different heme sources in <i>Trypanosoma cruzi</i> epimastigotes

Transcriptomic response to different heme sources in Trypanosoma cruzi epimastigotes

Evelyn Tevere1,a, María G. Mediavilla1,a, Cecilia B. Di Capua1, Marcelo L. Merli1, Carlos Robello2,3, Luisa Berná2,4 and Julia A. Cricco

This study uncovers how the Chagas disease parasite adapts to changes in heme, an essential molecule for its survival, providing transcriptional clues to heme metabolism and identifying a previously unreported heme-binding protein in T. cruzi.

, January 21, 2026

Sir2 regulates selective autophagy in stationary-phase yeast cells

Ji-In Ryua, Juhye Junga, and Jeong-Yoon Kim

This study establishes Sir2 as a previously unrecognized regulator of selective autophagy during the stationary phase and highlight how cells dynamically control organelle degradation.

, March 3, 2014

Protein oxidation in the intermembrane space of mitochondria is substrate-specific rather than general

Valentina Peleh1, Jan Riemer2, Andrew Dancis3 and Johannes M. Herrmann1

In this work, the authors suggest that in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Mia40-dependent oxidation of proteins in the intermembrane space only takes place in specific proteins and presumably relies on the presence of Mia40-binding sites.

, January 15, 2014

Deletion of AIF1 but not of YCA1/MCA1 protects Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Candida albicans cells from caspofungin-induced programmed cell death

Christopher Chin1,2,#, Faith Donaghey1,#, Katherine Helming1,3,#, Morgan McCarthy1,#, Stephen Rogers1, and Nicanor Austriaco1

This work suggests that deleting AIF1 but not YCA1/MCA1 protects S. cerevisiae and Candida albicans from caspofungin-induced cell death. This is not only the first time that AIF1 has been specifically tied to cell death in Candida but also the first time that caspofungin resistance has been linked to the cell death machinery in yeast.

, January 5, 2014

Reduced TORC1 signaling abolishes mitochondrial dysfunctions and shortened chronological lifespan of Isc1p-deficient cells

Vitor Teixeira1,2, Tânia C. Medeiros1, Rita Vilaça1,2, Pedro Moradas-Ferreira1,2, and Vítor Costa1,2

Overall, this article shows that the TORC1-Sch9p axis is deregulated in Isc1p-deficient Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells, contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction, enhanced oxidative stress sensitivity and premature aging of isc1Δ cells.

, January 4, 2014

Early manifestations of replicative aging in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Maksim I. Sorokin1,3, Dmitry A. Knorre2,3, and Fedor F. Severin2,3

The data preseted herein suggest that retrograde signaling starts to malfunction in relatively young cells, leading to accumulation of heterogeneous mitochondria within one cell. The latter may further contribute to a decline in stress resistances.

, December 26, 2013

Tracking autophagy during proliferation and differentiation of Trypanosoma brucei

William R. Proto1, Nathaniel G. Jones1, Graham H. Coombs2, and Jeremy C. Mottram1

This article provides insights into the function of autophagy, a cellular degradation and recycling pathway, in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei.

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, August 25, 2025

Gut microbiota and ankylosing spondylitis: current insights and future challenges

Andrei Lobiuc1, Liliana Groppa2, Lia Chislari2, Eugeniu Russu2,3, Marinela Homitchi2,3, Camelia Ciorescu2,3, Sevag Hamamah4, I. Codruta Bran1 and Mihai Covasa1

This review explores the growing role of gut microbiota in AS and its potential to reshape targeted treatment strategies and facilitate development of adjunct therapies to address disease onset and progression.

, May 15, 2025
Advancements in vaginal microbiota, <i>Trichomonas vaginalis</i>, and vaginal cell interactions: Insights from co-culture assays

Advancements in vaginal microbiota, Trichomonas vaginalis, and vaginal cell interactions: Insights from co-culture assays

Fernanda Gomes Cardoso and Tiana Tasca

This review updates co-culture and co-incubation techniques for studying interactions of Lactobacillus spp., representing a pre-dominant member of the healthy vaginal microbiota; Candida spp., the most abundant yeast in the vagina, and T. vaginalis, responsible for the most widespread nonviral STI worldwide.

, April 15, 2025
Influence of cervicovaginal microbiota on <i>Chlamydia trachomatis</i> infection dynamics

Influence of cervicovaginal microbiota on Chlamydia trachomatis infection dynamics

Emily Hand1, Indriati Hood-Pishchany1,2, Toni Darville1,2 and Catherine M. O’Connell2

This review examines the complex interplay between the cervicovaginal microbiome, C. trachomatis infection, and host immune responses, highlighting the role of metabolites such as short-chain and long-chain fatty acids, indole, and iron in modulating pathogen survival and host defenses.

, March 31, 2025
Unveiling the molecular architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain of <i>Acanthamoeba castellanii</i>

Unveiling the molecular architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain of Acanthamoeba castellanii

Christian Q. Scheckhuber1, Sutherland K. Maciver2 and Alvaro de Obeso Fernandez del Valle1

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the mitochondrial res-piratory chain in A. castellanii, focusing on the key alternative components involved in oxidative phosphorylation and their roles in energy metabolism, stress response, and adaptation to various conditions.

, February 20, 2025
Paving the way for new antimicrobial peptides through molecular de-extinction

Paving the way for new antimicrobial peptides through molecular de-extinction

Karen O. Osiro1, Abel Gil-Ley2, Fabiano C. Fernandes1,3, Kamila B. S. de Oliveira2, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez4-7, Octavio L. Franco1,2

The advancement of artificial intelligence and molecular de-extinction offers a valuable opportunity not only to discover new antimicrobials but also to provide accurate in silico predictions, thereby shortening the path to addressing the global antibiotic resistance crisis.

, November 11, 2024
Efflux pumps: gatekeepers of antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus biofilms

Efflux pumps: gatekeepers of antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus biofilms

Shweta Sinha1, Shifu Aggarwal2,3 and Durg Vijai Singh1

This review aims to elucidate the complex relationship between efflux pumps, antibiotic resistance and biofilm formation in S. aureus with the aim to aid in the development of potential therapeutic targets for combating S. aureus infections, especially those associated with biofilms.

, August 2, 2024
Understanding the molecular mechanisms of human diseases: the benefits of fission yeasts

Understanding the molecular mechanisms of human diseases: the benefits of fission yeasts

Lajos Acs-Szabo, Laszlo-Attila Papp and Ida Miklos

Here we collect the latest laboratory protocols and bioinformatics tools for the fission yeasts to highlight the many possibilities available to the research community. In addition, we present several limiting factors that everyone should be aware of when working with yeast models.

, July 4, 2024
Characterising glycosaminoglycans in human breastmilk and their potential role in infant health

Characterising glycosaminoglycans in human breastmilk and their potential role in infant health

Melissa Greenwood1,2, Patricia Murciano-Martínez3, Janet Berrington4, Sabine L Flitsch5, Sean Austin2 and Christopher Stewart1

Glycosaminoglycans are bioactive components present in breast milk and play a potential key role in determining infant health yet are overlooked by many contemporary studies. This review explores their relevance, use and characterisation techniques.

, July 3, 2024
Neutralizing the threat: harnessing broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 for treatment and prevention

Neutralizing the threat: harnessing broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 for treatment and prevention

Juan C Becerra1, Lauren Hitchcock1, Khoa Vu1 and Johannes S Gach1

This review provides an overview of the advancements in HIV- 1-specific broadly neutralizing antibodies and discusses the insights gathered from recent clinical trials regarding their application in treating and preventing HIV-1 infection.

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, February 21, 2025

It takes four to tango: the cooperative adventure of scientific publishing

Didac Carmona-Gutierrez1,2, Katharina Kainz1 and Frank Madeo1-3

This Editorial is the 500th article published in Microbial Cell, a journey that started in 2014 and has seen the journal grow steadily and maintain itself as a respected community platform. The foundation that has allowed for and driven this development – as for any responsible journal – is composed of four essential pillars: the readers, the authors, the editors and the referees.

, August 20, 2024
Patterns of protein synthesis in the budding yeast cell cycle: variable or constant?

Patterns of protein synthesis in the budding yeast cell cycle: variable or constant?

Eun-Gyu No, Heidi M Blank and Michael Polymenis

Proteins are the principal macromolecular constituent of proliferating cells, and protein synthesis is viewed as a primary metric of cell growth. While there are celebrated examples of proteins whose levels are periodic in the cell cycle (e.g., cyclins), the concentration of most proteins was not thought to change in the cell cycle, but some recent results challenge this notion. The ‘bulk’ protein is the focus of this article, specifically the rate of its synthesis, in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

, June 1, 2023

Ribose 5-phosphate: the key metabolite bridging the metabolisms of nucleotides and amino acids during stringent response in Escherichia coli?

Paulina Katarzyna Grucela1, Tobias Fuhrer2, Uwe Sauer2, Yanjie Chao3 and Yong Everett Zhang1

Here we propose the metabolite ribose 5’-phosphate as the key link between nucleotide and amino acid metabolisms and a working model integrating both the transcriptional and metabolic effects of (p)ppGpp on E. coli physiological adaptation during the stringent response.

August 24, 2022

Flagellated bacterial porter for in situ tumor vaccine

Haiheng Xu1, Yiqiao Hu1, 2 and Jinhui Wu1, 2, 3

Cancer immunotherapy, which use the own immune system to attack tumors, are increasingly popular treatments. But, due to the tumor immunosuppressive microenvironment, the antigen presentation in the tumor is limited. Recently, a growing number of people use bacteria to stimulate the body’s immunity for tumor treatment due to bacteria themselves have a variety of elements that activate Toll-like receptors. Here, we discuss the use of motility of flagellate bacteria to transport antigens to the tumor periphery to activate peritumoral dendritic cells to enhance the effect of in situ tumor vaccines.

August 1, 2022

The rise of Candida auris: from unique traits to co-infection potential

Nadine B. Egger1,§, Katharina Kainz1,§, Adina Schulze1, Maria A. Bauer1, Frank Madeo1-3 and Didac Carmona-Gutierrez1

Candida auris is a multidrug resistant (MDR) fungal pathogen with a crude mortality rate of 30-60%. First identified in 2009, C. auris has been rapidly rising to become a global risk in clinical settings and was declared an urgent health threat by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A concerted global action is thus needed to successfully tackle the challenges created by this emerging fungal pathogen. In this brief article, we underline the importance of unique virulence traits, including its easy transformation, its persistence outside the host and its resilience against multiple cellular stresses, as well as of environmental factors that have mainly contributed to the rise of this superbug.

April 4, 2022

A hundred spotlights on microbiology: how microorganisms shape our lives

Didac Carmona-Gutierrez1, Katharina Kainz1, Andreas Zimmermann1, Sebastian J. Hofer1, Maria A. Bauer1, Christoph Ruckenstuhl1, Guido Kroemer2-4 and Frank Madeo1,5,6

Viral, bacterial, fungal and protozoal biology is of cardinal importance for the evolutionary history of life, ecology, biotechnology and infectious diseases. Various microbiological model systems have fundamentally contributed to the understanding of molecular and cellular processes, including the cell cycle, cell death, mitochondrial biogenesis, vesicular fusion and autophagy, among many others. Microbial interactions within the environment have profound effects on many fields of biology, from ecological diversity to the highly complex and multifaceted impact of the microbiome on human health. Also, biotechnological innovation and corresponding industrial operations strongly depend on microbial engineering. With this wide range of impact in mind, the peer-reviewed (…)

March 21, 2022

Yeast goes viral: probing SARS-CoV-2 biology using S. cerevisiae

Brandon Ho1, Raphael Loll-Krippleber1 and Grant W. Brown1

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has long been an outstanding platform for understanding the biology of eukaryotic cells. Robust genetics, cell biology, molecular biology, and biochemistry complement deep and detailed genome annotation, a multitude of genome-scale strain collections for functional genomics, and substantial gene conservation with Metazoa to comprise a powerful model for modern biological research. Recently, the yeast model has demonstrated its utility in a perhaps unexpected area, that of eukaryotic virology. Here we discuss three innovative applications of the yeast model system to reveal functions and investigate variants of proteins encoded by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

, December 6, 2021

Murals meet microbes: at the crossroads of microbiology and cultural heritage

Maria A. Bauer1, Katharina Kainz1, Christoph Ruckenstuhl1, Frank Madeo1-3 and Didac Carmona-Gutierrez1

This article comments on the duality of microorganisms in the conservation and restoration of cultural heritage, which encompasses the negative impact of damaging microorganisms and recent advances in using specific microorganisms and microbial-based technologies for cultural heritage preservation.

, September 21, 2021

Urm1, not quite a ubiquitin-like modifier?

Lars Kaduhr1, Cindy Brachmann1, Keerthiraju Ethiraju Ravichandran2,3, James D. West4, Sebastian Glatt2 and Raffael Schaffrath1

This article comments on work published by Brachmann et al. (Redox Biol, 2020), which studied urmylation of the yeast 2-Cys peroxiredoxin Ahp1, uncovering that promiscuous lysine target sites and specific redox requirements determine the Urm1 acceptor activity of the peroxiredoxin.

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Microbial Cell

is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes exceptionally relevant research works that implement the use of unicellular organisms (and multicellular microorganisms) to understand cellular responses to internal and external stimuli and/or human diseases.

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FAQs

Whether you’re preparing a manuscript, reviewing a paper, or just exploring the journal, this FAQ answers the essentials—from scope and founders to impact and how to submit. Prefer a tailored path? Pick For authors or For reviewers below.

Peer-reviewed, open-access research using unicellular organisms (and multicellular microorganisms) to understand cellular responses and human disease.

The journal (founded in 2014) is led by its Editors-in-Chief Frank Madeo, Didac Carmona-Gutierrez, and Guido Kroemer

Microbial Cell has been publishing original scientific literature since 2014, and from the very beginning has been managed by active scientists through an independent Publishing House (Shared science Publishers). The journal was conceived as a platform to acknowledge the importance of unicellular organisms, both as model systems as well as in the biological context of human health and disease.

Ever since, Microbial Cell has very positively developed and strongly grown into a respected journal in the unicellular research community and even beyond. This scientific impact is reflected in the yearly number of citations obtained by articles published in Microbial Cell, as recorded by the Web of Science (Clarivate, formerly Thomson/Reuters):

The scientific impact of Microbial Cell is also mirrored in a series of milestones:

2015: Microbial Cell is included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), a selection of developing journals drafted by Clarivate Analytics based on the candidate’s publishing standards, quality, editorial content, and citation data. Note: As an ESCI-selected journal, Microbial Cell is currently being evaluated in a rigorous and long process to determine an inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), which allows the official calculation of Clarivate Analytics’ impact factor.

2016: Microbial Cell is awarded the so-called DOAJ Seal by the selective Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ Seal is an exclusive mark of certification for open access journals granted by DOAJ to journals that adhere to outstanding best practice and achieve an extra high and clear commitment to open access and high publishing standards.

2017: Microbial Cell is included in Pubmed Central (PMC), allowing the archiving of all the journal’s articles in PMC and PubMed.

2019: Microbial Cell is indexed in the prestigious abstract and citation database Scopus after a thorough selection process. This also means that Microbial Cell obtains, for the first time, an official Scopus CiteScore as well as an official journal ranking in the Scimago Journal and Country Ranking.

2022: Microbial Cell’s CiteScore reaches a value of 7.2 for the year 2021, positioning Microbial Cell among the top microbiology journals (previously available CiteScores: 2019: 5.4; 2020: 5.1).

2022: Microbial Cell is indexed in the highly selective Science Citation Index Expanded™, which covers approx. 9,500 of the world’s most impactful journals across 178 scientific disciplines. In their journal selection and curation process, Clarivate´s editors apply 24 ‘quality’ criteria and four ‘impact’ criteria to select the most influential journals in their respective fields. This selection is also a pre-requisite for inclusion in the JCR, which features the impact factor.

2022: Microbial Cell is listed in the Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR), and obtains its first official Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF) for the year 2021: 5.316.

Check Article Types and Manuscript Preparation guidelines. Submit online via Scholastica.