Emerging themes in microbial stress response and mechanistic insights: key findings from the fall 2024 ASM Theobald Smith Society meeting.

The annual fall meeting for the Theobald Smith Society was held in November 2024 on the campus of Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Eighty-six branch members from across New Jersey attended the meeting, composed of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral trainees, faculty members, and government and industry professionals. This report highlights the breadth and diversity of research conducted by American Society for Microbiology members in the Theobald Smith Society and celebrates their groundbreaking discoveries.

Host diversity slows bacteriophage adaptation by selecting generalists over specialists.

Most viruses can infect multiple hosts, yet the selective mechanisms that maintain multi-host generalists over single-host specialists remain an open question. Here we propagate populations of the newly identified bacteriophage øJB01 in coculture with many host genotypes and find that while phage can adapt to infect any of the new hosts, increasing the number of hosts slows the rate of adaptation. We quantify trade-offs in the capacity for individual phage to infect different hosts and find that phage from evolved populations with more hosts are more likely to be generalists.

Silicon Incorporated Morpholine Antifungals: Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation.

Known morpholine class antifungals (fenpropimorph, fenpropidin, and amorolfine) were synthetically modified through silicon incorporation to have 15 sila-analogues. Twelve sila-analogues exhibited potent antifungal activity against different human fungal pathogens such as Candida albicans, Candida glabrata, Candida tropicalis, Cryptococcus neoformans, and Aspergillus niger. Sila-analogue 24 (fenpropimorph analogue) was the best in our hands, which showed superior fungicidal potential than fenpropidin, fenpropimorph, and amorolfine.