Ottenhoff and Kaufmann discuss recent progress in the development, testing, and clinical evaluation of new vaccines against tuberculosis: from a pipeline virtually empty of new TB candidate vaccines in the early 1990s, to an era in which a dozen novel TB vaccine candidates are being evaluated in human clinical trials.
Edgren et al. give a brief overview on the development of the Type III Secretion System (T3SS). They describe the major discoveries that led to the development of the injection model and present a new model for T3SS dependent protein translocation.
When modern humans left Africa 60,000 years ago they were already infected with Helicobacter pylori. But how long were humans infected by H. pylori prior to the out-of-Africa event? Did this co-evolution predate the emergence of modern humans, spanning the species divide? Moodley et al. set out to answer these questions.
The ability to switch from rapidly progressing, lytic spread in epithelia to a nonproductive, latent infection in sensory neurons is fundamental to the life cycle of HSV. Hafezi et al. demonstrate that the site of entry is an important determinant of the lytic/latent decision in the infected neuron.
The corn smut Ustilago maydis establishes a biotrophic interaction with its host plant maize. This interaction requires efficient suppression of plant immune responses. Hemetsberger et al. present the functional characterization of the effector protein Pep1 and demonstrate that it acts as a potent suppressor of early plant defenses by inhibition of peroxidase activity.
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