Microbiology
Category archives for Microbiology
Petroplague – Book Review
Posted by Kevin Bonham on October 15, 2011 Disclosure Note: I was given a free digital copy of this book for review. Thrillers aren’t typically my cup of tea. I most often stick to non-fiction, and when it comes to novels, I tend to favor books that use the plot to develop characters, rather than the other way around. But when Amy Rogers…
Nudists are infectious just like everyone else
Posted by Kevin Bonham on September 27, 2011 In other words, you’re more likely to catch a cold from shaking their hand than to get an STI from Sitting on the same bench. There isn’t much reason to fear getting a sexually transmitted disease from naked sitters. These infections are most commonly the result of vigorous and prolonged exposure of a person’s mucous…
Instructions for a retrovirus vaccine? Not really
Posted by Kevin Bonham on September 13, 2011 When folks in my lab think about biological problems, we think about basics. A pathogen has some molecular component that trips a sensor on the outside of a cell. That sensor (the receptor) grabs on to some adapter proteins and starts a cascade of chemical reactions catalyzed by various enzymes, which eventually leads to the…
Check out the sea floor… live
Posted by Heather Olins on August 23, 2011 Ever wondered what the bottom of the ocean looks like? Well, now’s your chance to check out streaming live HD footage from the ROV ROPOS which is currently working out at Axial Volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Currently they are checking out a brand new lava flow, but later this evening and tomorrow…
Heather at Sea
Posted by Kevin Bonham on July 12, 2011 In some ways, I’m kinda jealous of the research Heather does. I love my macrophages, but studying the bugs that live in the extreme environment of deep sea hydrothermal vents has always fascinated me. As a consequence of the stuff she studies, Heather also has to (gets to?) take multi-week sea voyages to travel out…
Sterilizing everything is actually bad
Posted by Kevin Bonham on July 5, 2011 There’s a great post at the Sciam guest blog describing the science of antimicrobial cleaners, and it doesn’t look promising: perhaps the most comprehensive study of the effectiveness of antibiotic and non-antibiotic soaps in the U.S., led by Elaine Larson at Columbia University (with Aiello as a coauthor), found that while for healthy hand washers…
Badass Bacteria vs Malaria
Posted by Kevin Bonham on June 9, 2011 In the wild, as I wrote about last week, some strains of commensal bacteria in mosquitoes seem to confer some resistance to infection with Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria in humans. Not content to wait for for nature to get around to it, researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided to see if they could…
Not bored of Arsenic yet?
Posted by Heather Olins on June 6, 2011 The arsenic story continues. After much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the controversial paper claiming to have discovered life that uses arsenic rather than phosphorus in its DNA, Science has published 8 critiques of the paper and a response by the author. You can find them here. I enjoyed reading them, and was…
Bacterial ROS to the malaria rescue!
Posted by Kevin Bonham on June 1, 2011 You’ve all heard of Malaria. It’s bad. It infects hundreds of millions of people, mostly in developing nations. It rarely leads directly to death*, but the resulting illness can lay people out for days or weeks, increasing an already heavy economic burden on many of the poorest countries in the world. Folks from affluent regions…
Antibiotic resistance ignores boundaries – of species and countries
Posted by Kevin Bonham on May 11, 2011 Maryn McKenna has a typically great post about the rise and spread of a strain of multi-antibiotic resistant Staph aureus. It arose in Holland, where it spread to pigs, picked up resistance to the antibiotic tetracycline, and then jumped back into humans. Then it spread across the EU and into the US. As is often…
