Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the "fruit fly", is a genetically tractable model organism widely used to study biological processes, notably the innate immune system. The advent of novel genome editing technologies, such as the CRISPR-Cas9 syst ...
Antibiotic resistance is nowadays a major public health issue. Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility tests (AST) are one of the options to fight this deadly threat. Performing AST with single-cell sensitivity that is rapid, cheap, and widely accessible, is ch ...
The pathogenic bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) can invade the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and cause meningitis with devastating consequences. Whether and how sensory cells in the central nervous system (CNS) become activated during bacteri ...
The abusive use of antimicrobial drugs during the last eighty years has favoured the natural selection of resistant pathogens able to neutralise drugs efficiently. Nowadays, antimicrobial resistance contributes to millions of deaths yearly, threatens the e ...
Biofilm formation is generally recognized as a bacterial defense mechanism against environmental threats, including antibiotics, bacteriophages, and leukocytes of the human immune system. Here, we show that for the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae, biofilm f ...
Background Innate immune cells play a crucial role in responding to microbial infections, but their improper activation can also drive inflammatory disease. For this reason, their activation state is governed by a multitude of factors, including the metabo ...
A variety of physical inputs acts onto bacteria in nature. However, these are most often ignored in the studies of their physiology. There is now increasing evidence indicating that bacteria respond to physical stimuli, including mechanical forces. Yet, qu ...
Hepatitis B virus remains a major medical burden with more than 250 million chronically infected patients worldwide and 900,000 deaths each year, due to the disease progression towards severe complications (cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma). Despite the ...
Vaccine technology is still facing challenges regarding some infectious diseases, which can be addressed by innovative drug delivery systems. In particular, nanoparticle-based vaccines combined with new types of adjuvants are actively explored as a platfor ...