Microbiology

When bacterial pathogens enter our bodies, they’ve got one goal—hunt for food to multiply. And during the process, they make us sick. Eric Skaar, Ernest W. Goodpasture Professor of Pathology and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation, is uncovering how pathogens compete with healthy microbes for essential nutrients. He was recently elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Read More

In a groundbreaking study led by Sarah Worthan, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Behringer Lab at Vanderbilt University, scientists have successfully evolved microbial cultures that possess the ability to sense pH changes, enabling rapid responses to environmental fluctuations. Read More

Carterra Inc. and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences announced the addition of the Carterra LSAXT label-free interaction analysis platform to the Center for Structural Biology. Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers will be able to discover and characterize large molecules including antibodies. Read More

Recent microbiological research has shown that plants and animals, including humans, are not autonomous individuals but are holobionts: biomolecular networks that consist of visible hosts plus millions of invisible microbes. Read More

  Eric Skaar, Ph.D., MPH Eric Skaar, Ph.D., MPH, the Ernest W. Goodpasture Professor of Pathology, has been elected to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Skaar is one of seven current Vanderbilt faculty members who are AAM fellows. The 2,400-member academy is an… Read More

The strength of Vanderbilt biochemistry, especially in the area of metabolism and diabetes, has a lot to do with a brilliant husband-and-wife research team escaping the rise of Nazism in the early 1920s. Read More

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have discovered that an unusual set of immune cells, called invariant natural killer T cells, can exacerbate obesity-related inflammation. Read More

Antibodies to the 2009 H1N1 influenza strain reveal new insights into how antibody diversity forms and functions, with possible implications for designing flu vaccines. Read More

The antibiotics of the future could take a page from the immune system’s playbook – and “starve” bacteria of the nutrients they need. Read More