Microbe Manipulations

Pathogens that invade the human body have different preferences for the tissues they target. Some make their home in the gastrointestinal tract, for example, while others, like Mycoplasma pneumoniae (viewed here under a scanning electron microscope) head for the lungs. By manipulating the genetics of such microbial foes to remove their disease-causing capabilities, scientists are attempting to exploit the bacteria’s tissue-homing qualities for medical use – such as delivering therapeutic cargoes. Towards this goal, researchers have recently performed an 'essentiality scan' of the genome of M. pneumoniae to determine which genes are critical to the organism’s survival and which it can do without. Under laboratory conditions, almost half (317) of the bacteria’s 707 protein-coding genes turned out to be dispensable. Armed with these results, researchers can now make informed genetic engineering choices when designing therapeutic versions of M. pneumoniae, rather than simply relying on trial and error.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Maria Lluch-Senar, Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). Research by Samuel Miravet-Verde & Raul Burgos et al, at CRG
• Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Molecular Systems Biology, August 2025