It was long thought that when the membrane of a cell lost its integrity and broke down, the cell would die; cells cannot survive without a cell wall. Many antibiotics target the cell wall of bacteria, ...

A transporter which some bacteria use to recycle fragments of their cell wall has been discovered. Researchers found that the transporter controls resistance to certain kinds of cell-wall targeting ...

For bacteria, the first line of defense is the cell wall, which keeps toxins such as antibiotics out. Now, researchers have discovered a key mechanism that bacteria use to build their cell walls, ...

Bacteria are evolving to elude our drugs at an alarming rate, so much so that the UN has declared antibiotic resistance a global health emergency with the expectation that it could kill millions upon ...

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden published a study “Breaking barriers: pCF10 type 4 secretion system relies on a self-regulating muramidase to modulate the cell wall” in mBIO that describes ...

The bacterial cell wall must be constantly remodeled in order to grow and divide. This involves the close coordination of lytic enzymes and peptidoglycan synthesis. Researchers led by Martin ...

Endolysins are phage‐encoded enzymes that degrade the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, a process essential for the release of progeny virions. Their ability to precisely cleave key bonds ...

The first detailed images of an elusive drug target on the outer wall of bacteria may provide scientists with enough new information to aid design of novel antibiotics. The drugs are much needed to ...

Textbook images show peptidoglycan as straight and ordered. The biopolymer peptidoglycan that makes up bacterial cell walls was always assumed to be highly ordered. Textbook images like the one below ...