A Fungus Among Us
mikethemadbiologist | December 12, 2007Earlier this week, I attended the International Human Microbiome Consortium Meeting (the human microbiome consists of the organisms that live on and in us). I'm not sure to make of the whole microbiome initiative, but one thing is clear to me: this is being driven by the wrong group of scientists.
Instead of being directed by biologists (medical primarily) who have devised a set of important questions, and want to use the power of high throughput genomics, including metagenomics which sequences of all the DNA in a specimen--bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, and, yes, human (which raises…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2007If don't already know, the world's frog (and other amphibian) populations are facing a massive decline. One cause is an infection by chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease. Scientists in New Zealand have announced that treatment with chloramphenicol, an antibacterial agent can cure chytridiomycosis:
Fearful that chytridiomycosis might wipe out New Zealand's critically endangered Archey's frog (Leiopelma archeyi), the researchers have been hunting for a compound that would kill off the disease's trigger, the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.
They tested the chloramphenicol candidate on two…
mikethemadbiologist | June 5, 2007...and order anything that comes with "assorted meats." You see, I thought that would mean mammals and birds. Instead, we got this:
We couldn't even identify in which phylum half of this stuff was. There was one thing that couldn't make it past my nose. When we asked what it was, we were told "Chinese seafood." As you might guess, there was a little left over:
Oh well. The braised duck was very good...
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2007No, not those hideous boots! The Ug99 black stem rust fungus, a strain of Puccinia graminis. It doesn't kill people directly, but it could wipe out much of the world's wheat crop. As always, the developing world will probably be hit the hardest. And it's a potential failure of surveillance.
First, what the Ug99 fungus is:
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties…