Much has been learned about the energization of nutrient transport since Hoagland in 1944 gave his famous series of lectures on plant nutrition. Already at that time it was speculated that energy for transport of solutes into cells was provided by compounds containing energy-rich phosphate bonds (Hoagland, 1944). We now know that ATP-consuming proton pumps drive nutrient transport at several entry points in the plant body. In this Update, we will focus on those entry points within the plant body where nutrient transport is intense, and we will discuss their energization and regulation by proton pumps.

Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing is in high demand in health care fields as antimicrobial-resistant bacterial strains emerge and spread. Here, we describe an optical screening system (oCelloScope) which, based on time-lapse imaging of 96 bacteria-antibiotic combinations at a time, introduces real-time detection of bacterial growth and antimicrobial susceptibility with imaging material to support the automatically generated graphs. Automated antibiotic susceptibility tests of a monoculture showed statistically significant antibiotic effects within 6 min and within 30 min in complex samples from pigs suffering from catheter-associated urinary tract infections. The oCelloScope system provides a fast high-throughput screening method for detecting bacterial susceptibility that might entail an earlier diagnosis and introduction of appropriate targeted therapy and thus combat the threat from multidrug-resistant pathogenic bacteria. The oCelloScope system can be employed for a broad range of applications within bacteriology and might present new vistas as a point-of-care instrument in clinical and veterinary settings.