It’s a murder mystery of massive proportion, albeit on a miniature scale: Male-killing among several species of insects, caused by selfish symbiotic bacteria. Swiss researchers believe they have finally solved a question that has stumped scientists for decades, with potential implications for pest and infection control. [caption id="attachment_31327" align="alignright" width="270"] Researchers have identified the toxin responsible for selective killing of male fruit flies (left) using PacBio sequencing.[/caption] In a recent Nature publication, Toshiyuki Harumoto and Bruno Lemaitre of the Global Health Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, have reported their findings regarding a toxin…
[caption id="attachment_26599" align="alignright" width="300"] Haemophilus influenzae, a sample of which was deposited to the NCTC collection by Alexander Fleming, from his own nose.[/caption] The genomes of 3,000 strains of bacteria, including some of the deadliest in the world, are now available to researchers as part of an ambitious project by the UK’s National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC), in partnership with the Wellcome Sanger Institute and PacBio. Plague, cholera, streptomyces, and 250 strains of E. coli, are among the reference genomes created, as well as all ‘type strains’ of the bacteria in the collection -- the first strains that describe…
[caption id="attachment_18662" align="alignright" width="300"] From CDC/Courtesy of Larry Stauffer, Oregon State Public Health Laboratory[/caption] Scientists from the University of Hong Kong recently reported results of a head-to-head comparison of long-read and short-read platforms for sequencing and assembly of a bacterial genome. They determined that only SMRT Sequencing was capable of generating highly accurate, complete assemblies. “Completing bacterial genomes should no longer be regarded as a luxury, but rather as a cost-effective necessity,” the team reports. “PacBio But Not Illumina Technology Can Achieve Fast, Accurate and Complete Closure of the High GC, Complex Burkholderia pseudomallei Two-Chromosome Genome” was published in Frontiers in Microbiology…
A new publication reports the discovery and analysis of a nightmare bacterium that’s genetically resistant to all commercially available classes of antibiotics. The paper, “Stepwise evolution of pandrug-resistance in Klebsiella pneumonia,” came out this month in Scientific Reports from Nature. Lead authors Hosam Zowawi and Brian Forde, along with senior author David Paterson and several collaborators, studied an isolate recovered from the urine of an 87-year-old patient who was hospitalized in the United Arab Emirates last year. They used SMRT Sequencing to characterize the strain and its genetic mechanisms for drug resistance. That strain, MS6671, “was found to be non-susceptible to…
Richard Roberts, Nobel Laureate and Chief Scientific Officer of New England Biolabs, offers his thoughts on the utility of methylation data for understanding prokaryotes. In his words: “Please run SMRT Analysis to detect methylation in your prokaryotic PacBio data. Most bacteria and archaea encode DNA methylases, many of which are known components of restriction-modification systems. Usually, these are quite specific in terms of the sequences they recognize; the restriction component becomes a key defense mechanism preventing phages, plasmids, and other DNA elements from infecting the cell. Until recently, it was quite difficult to determine the recognition sequences of these methylases.…