FEMS Microbiology Letters

Chief Editor:  Jeff Cole

Latest MiniReview-now freely available                                              Next Generation Sequencing of microbial transcriptomes: challenges and opportunites! A. van Vliet Over the past fifteen years, microbial functional genomics has been made possible by the combined power of genome sequencing and microarray technology. However, we are now approaching the technical limits of microarray technology, and microarrays are now being superseded by transcriptomics based on hith-throughput (Next Generation) DNA sequencing technologies. The term RNA-seq has been coined to represent transcriptomics by Next generation Sequencing. Although pioneered on eukaryotic organisms due to the relative ease of working with eukaryotic mRNA, the RNA-seq technology is now being ported to microbial systems....Read more

Highlight: Lactobacillus helveticus inhibits C. jejuni invasion of human cells. Wine et al.

Campylobacter jejuni is the most common bacterial cause of enterocolitis in humans, leading to diarrhoea and chronic extraintestinal diseases. Although probiotics are effective in preventing other enteric infections, beneficial microorganisms have not been extensively studied with C. jejuni. The aim of this study was to delineate the ability of selected probiotic Lactobacillus strains to reduce epithelial cell invasion by C. jejuni. Human colon T84 and embryonic intestine 407 epithelial cells were pretreated with Lactobacillus strains and then infected with two prototypic C. jejuni pathogens. Lactobacillus helveticus, strain R0052 reduced C. jejuni invasion into T84 cells by 35–41%, whereas Lactobacillus rhamnosus R0011 did not reduce pathogen invasion.

volume 300-1, p.146

Scope of the journal

Research Letters cover the following subject categories:

Biotechnology Environmental microbiology; plant-microbe interactions Eukaryotic cells Evolution, taxonomy and typing

Genetics and molecular biology Genomics and bioinformatics Pathogenicity including veterinary microbiology Physiology and biochemistry