Bacteria

On Wednesday night, Oasis, a student team from Georgia Tech (center), won the $15,000 grand prize in the MIT Water Innovation Prize competition for its simple, inexpensive test for detecting E. coli in drinking water in India. Second-place prizes for $7,500 went to Velaron (right), developing a smart sensor system for aquaculture shrimp farmers, and Majik Water (left), developing a system that use...

Simple, low-cost E. coli test wins MIT Water Innovation Prize

Nine student teams pitched solutions to global water issues at annual event.

April 6, 2018

Katharina Ribbeck joined the MIT faculty in 2010.

Exploring the many roles of mucus

Katharina Ribbeck studies the sticky substance to uncover its impacts on health and disease.

April 2, 2018

MIT researchers have discovered that enzymes performing the same function in yeast and bacteria may have different structures, but are present in the same relative amounts within each type of cell.

Scientists find different cell types contain the same enzyme ratios

New discovery suggests that all life may share a common design principle.

March 29, 2018

A new special subject, 1.S992 (Agricultural Microbial Ecology) from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, took a group of undergraduate students to Israel over MIT’s Independent Activities Period to learn cutting-edge techniques used to study microbial communities.

A microbial approach to agriculture

A new special subject, Agricultural Microbial Ecology, takes students to Israel.

February 14, 2018

George Church gave the first lecture in the Department of Biology’s four-part IAP seminar series, Biology at Transformative Frontiers.

Reading and writing DNA

Department of Biology kicks off IAP seminar series with a lecture by synthetic-biology visionary George Church.

January 31, 2018

Electron microscope images of marine bacteria infected with the non-tailed viruses studied in this research. The bacterial cell walls are seen as long double lines, and the viruses are the small round objects with dark centers.

New type of virus found in the ocean

The unusual characteristics of these abundant, bacteria-killing viruses could lead to evolutionary insights.

January 24, 2018

MIT researchers have discovered a way to make bacteria more vulnerable to a class of antibiotics known as quinolones, which include ciprofloxacin and are often used to treat infections such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus.

Boosting the antibiotic arsenal

New strategy could enable existing drugs to kill bacteria that cause chronic infections.

December 7, 2017

A Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research study has revealed how an enzyme first isolated in bacteria and introduced into plants such as corn and soybeans in the 1990s can sometimes act imprecisely, and how it can be successfully re-engineered to be more precise.

Revealing an imperfect actor in plant biotechnology

Whitehead Institute researchers detect the chemical mistakes of a common herbicide-resistance enzyme, then successfully re-engineer it for enhanced precision.

November 29, 2017

Studies have shown that mothers who experience an infection severe enough to require hospitalization during pregnancy are at higher risk of having a child with autism.

Studies help explain link between autism, severe infection during pregnancy

Bacterial populations in mother’s GI tract may play a central role.

September 13, 2017

The MIT Department of Biology welcomes new assistant professors Joey Davis (left) and Rebecca Lamason.

New faculty welcomed to Department of Biology

Assistant professors Joey Davis and Rebecca Lamason will spearhead research initiatives into fundamental cellular processes.

September 11, 2017

2017 MPC-CMSE Summer Scholar Gaetana Michelet holds a pipette in the Biogel Lab of Katharina Ribbeck, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering at MIT. Ribbeck studies how complex materials such as mucus influence bacterial behavior.

Mucus’ influence on bacterial behavior

Summer Scholar Gaetana Michelet explores the role mucus plays in protecting people from getting sick.

September 8, 2017

D-Lab research associate Megha Hegde and two local students from India conduct a hands-on workshop on water filters with the women of Mujholi village in Ranikhet, Uttarakhand, India, for the new xylem filter technology, funded by J-WAFS Solutions.

J-WAFS awards commercialization grants to develop technologies for water and food solutions

Three new projects and two renewals receive J-WAFS Solutions grant funding for 2017-2018.

September 7, 2017

2017 Gilliam Fellowship awardee Lindsey Backman

Lindsey Backman awarded Gilliam Fellowship

Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellows are chosen for their potential to be leaders in their scientific fields and for their commitment to diversity.

August 18, 2017

“My training at MIT gave me an empathy for microbes,” says Emily Greenhagen. “It’s an approach that a lot of chemical engineers don’t necessarily think about and has been key to my success.”

A rose by any other name would smell as yeast

Emily Havens Greenhagen ’05 leads a team of scientists brewing perfume from yeast.

July 14, 2017

Researchers have discovered that Prochlorococcus varieties can each produce more than two dozen different peptides (molecules that are similar to proteins, but smaller).

Microbe generates extraordinarily diverse array of peptides

In marine bacteria, evolution of new specialized molecules follows a previously unknown path.

June 22, 2017

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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