Determining growth rates from bright-field images of budding cells through identifying overlaps.

Much of biochemical regulation ultimately controls growth rate, particularly in microbes. Although time-lapse microscopy visualises cells, determining their growth rates is challenging, particularly for those that divide asymmetrically, like , because cells often overlap in images. Here, we present the Birth Annotator for Budding Yeast (BABY), an algorithm to determine single-cell growth rates from label-free images.

Conversational Physical Activity Coaches for Spanish and English Speaking Women: A User Design Study.

Digital technologies, including text messaging and mobile phone apps, can be leveraged to increase people's physical activity and manage health. Chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence, can automatically interact with individuals through natural conversation. They may be more engaging than one-way messaging interventions.

Diffusion-driven enhancement of the antibiotic resistance selection window.

The current crisis of antimicrobial resistance in clinically relevant pathogens has highlighted our limited understanding of the ecological and evolutionary forces that drive drug resistance adaptation. For instance, although human tissues are highly heterogeneous, most of our mechanistic understanding about antibiotic resistance evolution is based on constant and well-mixed environmental conditions. A consequence of considering spatial heterogeneity is that, even if antibiotics are prescribed at high dosages, the penetration of drug molecules through tissues inevitably produces antibiotic gradients, exposing bacterial populations to a range of selective pressures and generating a dynamic fitness landscape that changes in space and time.

Phylogenomics picks out the par excellence markers for species phylogeny in the genus .

Although genome sequencing has become a very promising approach to conduct microbial taxonomy, few labs have the resources to afford this especially when dealing with data sets of hundreds to thousands of isolates. The goal of this study was to identify the most adequate loci for inferring the phylogeny of the species within the genus ; with the idea that those who cannot afford whole genome sequencing can use these loci to carry out species assignation confidently. We retrieved 177 orthologous groups (OGs) by using a genome-based phylogeny and an average nucleotide identity analysis.