Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that kills more than a million people worldwide every year. The pathogen that causes the disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is deadly in part because of its complex outer envelope, which helps it evade immune responses of infected hosts. In an ACS Infectious Diseases paper, researchers developed a chemical probe to study a key component of this envelope. Their results provide a step toward finding new ways of inactivating the bacterium.

In the microscopic battlefield of plant-microbe interactions, plants are constantly fighting off invading bacteria. New research reveals just how clever these bacterial invaders can be.

Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria, the ‘powerhouses’ of our cells, allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth. Scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge, have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate – a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars – into our mitochondria.