microbiology
sa smith | August 27, 2010Me: HAI GUYS! U NEED TO EAT GUD FUDS LIKE EGGS! EGGS ARE GUD AND CHEEP! LOL! YAY EAT EGGS U GET ABS LIKE ABS LOL!
News: Salmonella outbreak in eggs, Massive recalls
Me: FUUUUUUUUUU......
News: lol.
But thats not the only reason I bring this up. SciBlogs 'special' friend, HuffPo, scavenged an article from AP, which noted that one of the reasons why this salmonella-in-eggs recall is so epic, is because the US government doesnt require hens be vaccinated against salmonella. I thought this was neat info, and it turns out the eggs I normally buy do vaccinate their hens ($2.35 a dozen -0.35…
sa smith | August 16, 2010Thanks to BleachGate, this is probably the first time many of you all in the Skeptical Community have heard about Crohns Disease (SPOILER: kid with Chrons gets booted from a 'support' forum for speaking out against woo-'treatments').
Crohns is an inflammatory bowl disease (IBD), where your guts do fun things like shrink until your bowls are obstructed, or your body decides you need more passages out of your intestines (Google 'fistula'. I dare you.), and some times you just good-old-fashioned poop blood. So, dont confuse IBD with IBS, and dont get me started on IBS.
Crohns is the usual grab-…
sa smith | August 12, 2010We are fat.
We are really, really fat.
While some people are overweight/obese for very real medical conditions (thyroid issues, side-effects of medications, etc), the fact of the matter is, most of us just eat/drink too much crap and we live sedentary lifestyles.
That doesnt mean that we actually acknowledge this.
There is no shortage of excuses for the obesity epidemic. Even the CDC, who has a nice list of suggestions, cant resist passing the personal-responsibility-buck:
# It is often easier and cheaper to get less healthy foods and beverages.
# Foods high in sugar, fat, and salt are…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2010Maryn McKenna makes a critical, yet neglected point about the recent whooping cough (pertussis) outbreaks that have been hitting California--one that emphasizes that vaccination not only protects the vaccinated, but everyone else:
Between a day job as Scary Disease Girl and a childhood spent moving between continents, I am pretty much the most vaccinated person on the planet. I'd had my full series of pertussis vaccinations as a child. Surely I was protected?
Actually, no -- and unless you've had a booster, neither are you. The immunity created by the 5-dose childhood series wanes over time…
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2010Imagine someone had designed a device that would essentially eliminate bloodstream infections (sepsis) caused by contamination of needleless injection ports. Great news right? Well, guess what happens next:
Unlike some of the solutions floated by big medical device makers, such as coating the ports with silver, Shaw's innovation added only a few pennies to the cost of production. And it seemed to be remarkably effective: a 2007 clinical study funded by Shaw's company and conducted by the independent SGS Laboratories found the device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters…
grrlscientist | July 1, 2010tags: Following The Mercury Trail, health, environment, ecology, pollution, PCBs, DDT, heavy metals, red tide, human sewage pollution, Stephen Palumbi, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
There's a tight and surprising link between the ocean's health and ours, says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi. He shows how toxins at the bottom of the ocean food chain find their way into our bodies, with a shocking story of toxic contamination from a Japanese fish market. His work points a way forward for saving the oceans' health -- and humanity's.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2010Definitely breaking new ground around here. A recent paper in PLoS ONE examines the hypotheses surrounding the ecology and evolution of Komodo Dragon saliva. For those of you whose Komodo Dragonology is a little bit rusty, the saliva of Komodo Dragons can lead to infections that weaken or even kill prey that survive the original attack. Until this paper, there were two models to account for deadly drool:
1) Bacteria-as-venom model. The salivary bacteria are beneficial to the lizards, since they act as a de facto venom.
2) Passive acquisition model. Salivary bacteria are acquired from…
mikethemadbiologist | June 23, 2010When I first saw the title of this PloSOne article, "Unauthorized Horizontal Spread in the Laboratory Environment: The Tactics of Lula, a Temperate Lambdoid Bacteriophage of Escherichia coli", I thought, "Hunh?!? You can actually publish articles about laboratory contamination?", but it's actually a very interesting article. In short, the article describes the discovery of a bacteriophage ('phage')--a bacterial virus--that is very well suited for survival and spread in microbiology laboratories.
To be successful, Lula faces several problems:
1) It has to successfully hide from researchers…
grrlscientist | June 23, 2010tags: Great Microbiologists, Lego, brickfilm, animation, technology, scientists, history, microbiology, animalcule, streaming video
This is yet another Lego animation. This time, instead of recreating highlights of the World Cup 2010 games, this one shows highlights for the history of the field of microbiology. It's actually good enough to show as an intro to a microbiology course.
More Lego films can be found at Brickfilms.
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2010So I was at the ASM meeting last week, and one of the talks I heard was by Kim Ware about Clostridium difficile infection control: how one hospital learned to contain and prevent outbreaks (Note: these are from my notes; I haven't downloaded the presentation yet). C. difficile is a bacterium that causes diarrhea and more serious intestinal conditions such as colitis. It is often associated with antibiotic therapy and stays in healthcare environments: this is primarily a 'hospital disease.' While most cases result in diarrhea (which isn't trivial if you're already very sick), eleven…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2010tags: HIV and 'Flu -- The Vaccine Strategy, microbiology, epidemiology, virology, vaccines, medicine, public health, viruses, influenza, HIV, Seth Berkley, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Seth Berkley explains how smart advances in vaccine design, production and distribution are bringing us closer than ever to eliminating a host of global threats -- from AIDS to malaria to flu pandemics.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2010Every year, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) has an annual meeting that covers all topics in microbiology (I'll talk about some of the science next week). It's often in pretty good locations--this year, it was held in San Diego. But attendance has been dropping: a few years ago, over 12,000 people attended (it's a big meeting), and this year, less than 9,000 people attended--which is one of the worst turnouts in memory (and San Diego is a nice place, although I still think Philly--yes, Philadelphia--was the best site they've ever chosen).
I've heard rumors that the format of the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2010...assembly and analysis. From the depths of the Mad Biologist's Archives comes this post.
The Wellcome Trust has a very good (and mostly accurate) article about the 'next-gen' sequencing technologies. I'm going to focus on bacterial genomics because humans are boring (seriously, compared to two bacteria in the same species, once you've seen one human genome, you've seen them all).
Most of the time, when you read articles about sequencing, they focus on the actual production of raw sequence data (i.e., 'reads'). But that's not the rate-limiting step. That is, we have now reached the point…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2010I'm conflicted about Nicholas Kristof's recent op-ed about antibiotic resistant organisms. On the one hand, Kristof is one of the only national columnists to raise this issue at all. On the other hand, I found his most recent column somewhat confusing--and I'm an expert in this area (I also think he's jumping to unfounded conclusions, but more about that later in the post). I think this is largely an effect similar to playing "telephone": information is being transferred multiple times from the primary source and finally conveyed by someone with no biological training. So what I'm going…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2010The success of a European MRSA surveillance network shows just how stupid, foolish, and short-sighted the Obama Administration's decision to cut CDC antimicrobial resistance surveillance is. But let's turn this frown upside down campers, and look at the really cool website the European Staphylococcal Reference Laboratory Working Group set up.
Each of the Google Map pins represents a different surveillance laboratory. If you click on the pin, it tells you how many Staphylococcus aureus ('staph') isolates have been typed. You can then click the "view spa types" link. spa is a highly…
mikethemadbiologist | January 28, 2010Over at The Tree of Life, Jonathan Eisen asks:
What do people think are the potential benefits that could come from finishing?
For those who don't know what genome finishing is, I'll let Eisen give the short summary:
Finishing: Using any combination of laboratory, computational and other analyses one can both fill in gaps in the assembly and improve the quality of the assembly. This can generally be called "finishing"
In the context of microbial genomes, here are some of my thoughts about finishing (italics orignal; boldface mine):
Whole genomes don't come flying out of the sequencing…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2010Since I'm on-route to a Human Microbiome Project meeting (uncharacteristically, it's being held in a climate-friendly location--Houston; last year, it was held in Boston. In January.), reviewing this paper about the GEBA project, the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea, seemed appropriate. Sequencing bacterial genomes not only tells us a lot about the biology of the organisms sequenced, including their function, potential ecology, and evolution, but it also has a far more pragmatic use too.
As we try to understand microbial communities using DNA sequencing, including those microbes…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2010It turns your bacteria Jewish*. Seriously, the strong finding of this article was completely ignored. Anyway....
A recent paper describes the effect of circumsion on the bacteria that live on the penis. The authors swabbed uncircumsized and circumsized penises, and then PCR amplified the 16S rRNA gene which is found in all bacteria, and can be used as a 'barcode' to identify bacteria. This article has received a lot of attention because of this speculation in the discussion (italics mine):
The observed decrease in anaerobic bacteria after circumcision may be related to the elimination of…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2009Yesterday, four people emailed me, asking about Brian Palmer's Slate article about antibiotic resistance. Since I'll probably get more such emails (and thank you for sending them), I'll offer my thoughts below:
1) Palmer's basic point about antibiotic development not being the answer is right. All a new drug does is kick the can down the road, since resistance will evolve to the new drug. Having said that, we currently do need new drugs, so we shouldn't stop developing them.
2) Palmer is not correct about plasmid curing as being a solution to antibiotic resistance. If we come up with a…
ejohnson | November 2, 2009What if your clothes grew themselves in response to your body's temperature, becoming thicker in areas that needed more insulation and thinner in areas that were warm enough?
Sounds pretty much ideal. No worrying about whether you're going to need a scarf later in the evening or if a down parka was maybe not the right choice. But what if the clothing in question was made up of bacteria? Specifically, the bacteria on your own skin?
Austrian designer Sonja Bäumel envisioned this most organic of textiles in "Crocheted Membrane," one in a four-part series of experiments exploring the…