Microbiology has undergone radical changes over the past few decades, ushering in an exciting new era in science. In The New Microbiology, Pascale Cossart tells a splendid story about the revolution in microbiology, especially in bacteriology. This story has wide-ranging implications for human health and medicine, agriculture, environmental science, and our understanding of evolution. The revolution results from the powerful tools of molecular and cellular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics, which have yielded amazing discoveries, from entire genome sequences to video of bacteria invading host cells. This book is for both scientists and especially nonscientists who would like to learn more about the extraordinary world of bacteria.
Dr. Cossart's overview of the field of microbiology research, from infectious disease history to the ongoing scientific revolution resulting from CRISPR technologies, is presented in four parts.
- New concepts in microbiology introduces the world of bacteria and some recent discoveries about how they live, such as the role of regulatory RNAs including riboswitches, the CRISPR defense system, and resistance to antibiotics.
- Sociomicrobiology: the social lives of bacteria helps us see the new paradigm by which scientists view bacteria as highly social creatures that communicate in many ways, for example in the assemblies that reside in our intestine or in the environment.
- The biology of infections reviews some of history's worst epidemics and describes current and emerging infectious diseases, the organisms that cause them, and how they produce an infection.
- Bacteria as tools introduces us to molecules derived from microbes that scientists have harnessed in the service of research and medicine, including the CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing technology.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: New Concepts in Microbiology
Chapter 1 Bacteria: Many Friends, Few Enemies
Chapter 2 Bacteria: Highly Organized Unicellular Organisms
Chapter 3 The RNA Revolution
Chapter 4 From the CRISPR Defense System to the CRISPR/Cas9 Method for Modifying Genomes
Chapter 5 Antibiotic Resistance
Part II: Sociomicrobiology: The Social Lives of Bacteria
Chapter 6 Biofilms: When Bacteria Gather Together
Chapter 7 How Bacteria Communicate: Chemical Language and Quorum Sensing
Chapter 8 When Bacteria Kill Each Other
Chapter 9 Human-Animal Symbioses: The Microbiotas
Chapter 10 Bacterium-Plant Symbioses: Microbiotas of Plants
Chapter 11 Endosymbiotic Relationships
Part III: The Biology of Infections
Chapter 12 Pathogenic Bacteria, Major Scourges, and New Diseases
Chapter 13 The Multiple Strategies of Pathogenic Bacteria
Chapter 14 Pathogenic Bacteria in Insects
Chapter 15 Plants and Their Pathogenic Bacteria
Chapter 16 New Visions in Infection Defense
Part IV: Bacteria as Tools
Chapter 17 Bacteria as Tools for Research
Chapter 18 Bacteria: Old and New Health Tools
Chapter 19 Bacteria as Environmental Tools
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
