Viewpoint – Microbial Cell

Commentary, Viewpoint

The long and winding road of reverse genetics in Trypanosoma cruzi

Miguel A. Chiurillo¹ and Noelia Lander¹

This Editorial provides a brief historic overview that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the molecular strategies that have been developed to genetically modify Trypanosoma cruzi, emphasizing the future directions of the field.

Means of intracellular communication: touching, kissing, fusing

Anne Spang¹

This work highlights different aspects of communication between organelles, including the importance of organellar contact sites.

Neuropathogenesis caused by Trypanosoma brucei, still an enigma to be unveiled

Katherine Figarella¹

This Editorial addresses the meningo-encephalitic stage of Trypanosoma brucei infection and the resultig neuropathogenesis as well as the impact that the application of tools developed in the last years in the field of neuroscience will have on the study of neglected tropical diseases.

Lichens – growing greenhouses en miniature

Martin Grube¹

This commentary article provides an overview on different aspects of lichen biology and the remarkable symbiotic association between fungi and algae.

Regulation of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore and its effects on aging

Damiano Pellegrino-Coppola¹

Aging is linked to mitochondrial function, with the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) playing a key role. Yeast is a useful model for studying how mPTP affects cell survival, aging, and related diseases.

Fungal infections in humans: the silent crisis

Katharina Kainz¹, Maria A. Bauer¹, Frank Madeo^1-3 and Didac Carmona-Gutierrez¹

This article highlights the growing global threat of fungal infections - exacerbated by rising drug resistance and medical practices - and emphasizes the urgent need for intensified research to develop more effective antifungal strategies.

Digesting the crisis: autophagy and coronaviruses

Didac Carmona-Gutierrez¹, Maria A. Bauer¹, Andreas Zimmermann^1,2, Katharina Kainz¹,
Sebastian J. Hofer¹, Guido Kroemer^3-7 and Frank Madeo^1,2,8

This article reviews the multifaceted role of autophagy in antiviral defense and highlights how coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, interact with this pathway, raising the possibility that targeting autophagy could offer novel therapeutic strategies against COVID-19.

Raman-based sorting of microbial cells to link functions to their genes

Kang Soo Lee¹, Michael Wagner^2,3 and Roman Stocker¹

In this article, the authors comment on the study "An automated Raman-based platform for the sorting of live cells by functional properties" by Lee et al. (Nat Microbiol, 2019), which presents a high-throughput optofluidic platform that integrates Raman microspectroscopy and microfluidics to accurately link microbial phenotypes to genotypes within complex communities, enabling efficient functional sorting and analysis of microbiome members.

Viral attenuation by Endonuclease G during yeast gametogenesis: insights into ancestral roles of programmed cell death?

Jie Gao¹, Sabrina Chau¹ and Marc D. Meneghini¹

This article relates to the study "Meiotic viral attenuation through an ancestral apoptotic pathway" by Gao et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci, 2019), which shows that programmed cell death may have evolved as a viral defence mechanism, as demonstrated by yeast studies showing that the mitochondrial nuclease Nuc1 translocates to the cytosol during meiosis to attenuate dsRNA viruses, linking viral control to meiotic cell death processes.

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

August 20, 2024

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.

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

June 1, 2023

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.

Means of intracellular communication: touching, kissing, fusing

April 13, 2021

This work highlights different aspects of communication between organelles, including the importance of organellar contact sites.

Regulation of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore and its effects on aging

June 22, 2020

Digesting the crisis: autophagy and coronaviruses

May 4, 2020

Physiology, phylogeny, and LUCA

November 25, 2016

Genomes record their own history. But if we want to look all the way back to life's beginnings some 4 billion years ago, the record of microbial evolution that is preserved in prokaryotic genomes is not easy to read. The classical approach has been to look for genes that are universally distributed. Another approach is to make all trees for all genes, and sift out the trees where signals have been overwritten by lateral gene transfer. What is left ought to be ancient. If we do that, what do we find?

Similar environments but diverse fates: Responses of budding yeast to nutrient deprivation.

August 1, 2016

Diploid budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) can adopt one of several alternative differentiation fates in response to nutrient limitation, and each of these fates provides distinct biological functions. When different strain backgrounds are taken into account, these various fates occur in response to similar environmental cues, are regulated by the same signal transduction pathways, and share many of the same master regulators. I propose that the relationships between fate choice, environmental cues and signaling pathways are not Boolean, but involve graded levels of signals, pathway activation and master-regulator activity.

Yeast proteinopathy models: a robust tool for deciphering the basis of neurodegeneration

November 26, 2015

Protein quality control or proteostasis is an essential determinant of basic cell health and aging. Eukaryotic cells have evolved a number of proteostatic mechanisms to ensure that proteins retain functional conformation, or are rapidly degraded when proteins misfold or self-aggregate. This article discusses the use of budding yeast as a robust proxy to study the intersection between proteostasis and neurodegenerative disease.

Quorum protection, growth and survival

January 23, 2015

For the growth of a cell culture, one inoculates not with one cell but with a quorum of cells. This most often a requirement, not just a convenience, and most of us take this for granted without question. Here this observation is re-examined to understand why a quorum may be required to grow cells. The importance of quorums may be widespread in the aspects of microbiology they affect. It is very likely that quorums are connected with and have a large impact on the determination of Minimal Inhibitory Concentrations. It is also possible that low cell density may adversely affect cell survival, however, this is an area where even less is known. The need for a quorum might affect other aspects of microbial cell culture, cell isolation and cell preservation. Effects also extend to mammalian cell culture. Here I seek to review studies that have been documented and speculate on how the information might be utilized in the future.