Yes, I’m on Twitter- alandove: Should've redacted sequence of ancient girl's DNA. http://t.co/aomVOqla Now terrorists can synthesize cave-girl from scratch.
- alandove: National Academy of Sciences report (http://t.co/No8xHa5C ) - no second gunshot from grassy knoll. Must be part of conspiracy.
- alandove: Whenever I'm feeling negative, I just press ctrl-alt-cmd-8.
- alandove: Turdivirus is to virology as Uranus is to astronomy.
- alandove: RT @profvrr: This Week in Virology (TWiV) episode 169 is up: Epidemiology causes conclusions (p<0.05) http://t.co/2Hk5mwxr
- alandove: I gather there's some sort of sports event today. I mean besides the indoor triathlon I did this morning.
- alandove: Wondering if anyone's compared @Norovirus incidence at land resorts vs. cruise ships.
- alandove: Must remember to relax sphincter. RT @marynmck @lizditz launching bottle rockets from one's anus http://t.co/0j46Rc6n
- alandove: Blog post: A chat with Mike Osterholm (http://t.co/eKFzdFQ4 ) #H5N1 #NSABB
- alandove: @newprof1 Certainly much easier to type.
Tag Archives: microbiology
Sewage Treatment, Coral Disease, and Koch’s Postulates
Coral reefs are in a tight spot these days. Increasing CO2 levels and rising ocean temperatures aren’t doing them much good, but their biggest problems are more direct. Overfishing is wiping out important predators, the aquarium trade picks off whatever … Continue reading
Posted in Research Blogging
Tagged coral, diving, marine biology, microbiology, zoonosis
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I’ll Have Mine Well Done, Please
Favorite comment below this YouTube video: the one dubbing it “Soylent Brown.” Best moment in the video: 1:32 – look at the label on the refrigerator. Comforting thought: if McDonald’s adopts this, it will be an upgrade.
High-Definition Microscopy Movies – Now in 3-D
In a paper appearing right now in Nature Methods, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm campus describe a new type of microscopy that’s just chock full of awesomeness. By shooting a special pulsating light source into the … Continue reading
Microbes Munched Macondo’s Methane
Back in May, I blogged about a proposal to monitor dissolved methane levels in the Gulf of Mexico as a surrogate marker for oil. The idea was that the Deepwater Horizon blowout was spewing a mixture of oil and methane … Continue reading
Today is World Toilet Day. This is not a joke. In fact, it’s deadly serious. Follow the link for some sobering statistics about what inadequate plumbing means for billions of people.
2010.11.19
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Happy Hand Washing Day
Today is the United Nations’ first worldwide Hand Washing Day. Yes, it means exactly what it sounds like. As the BBC reports: “The message we are really trying to get out is the importance of correctly washing your hands with … Continue reading
Bringing Back an Oldie to Fight TB
In a new paper in PLoS Medicine, researchers have stumbled onto a promising “new” treatment for that resurgent scourge, tuberculosis:
“Rifapentine is back,” says Johns Hopkins infectious disease specialist Eric Nuermberger, M.D., whose studies in mice, to be published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine online Dec. 17, have found it so promising as an initial treatment for active TB that clinical trials are scheduled to begin next year in at least eight countries.
The mouse studies showed that substituting higher and daily doses of rifapentine for another antibiotic, rifampin, cured mice two to three times faster than the much older, standard regimen of drugs that includes rifampin. Researchers say if tests in people confirm the findings in mice, the average time to clear the potentially fatal bacterial infection could be reduced from six months to three or less.
Of course, that last “if” is a mighty big one. A longstanding saying in biomedical research is that mice lie and monkeys exaggerate. Still, this marks one of the few pieces of potentially good news in the ongoing fight against TB. Interestingly, rifapentine is a very old antibiotic that fell out of favor (and out of production) years ago, so the new work resurrects a forgotten antibiotic to treat a resurrected classical disease. If the strategy does pan out, we’ll just have to hope that rifapentine won’t fall into the same cycle of lax control, overprescription, and general misuse that’s made so many other antibiotics fail.
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An Antibacterial … What?
Among the deluge of press releases I see each day, there are inevitably a few odd ones. This news from computer technology maker ATEN, however, was exceptionally odd. It seems they’ve developed a new line of antibacterially-coated KVM switches. A KVM switch, as if you didn’t know, is the switch the über-geeks who administer server farms use to switch a single keyboard, video monitor, and mouse between multiple computers. And why does the world need antibacterial KVM switches? The PR flack at ATEN is glad you asked:
The average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat, and some of the most germ-contaminated items include the keyboard and mouse, according to a study conducted by the University of Arizona. Despite this fact, network administrators rarely have time to clean their desktops which can lead to the spread of bacteria in the data center. As a result, the presence of microbes contributes to the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses.
“We have designed these groundbreaking and nanocoated enterprise KVM switches to serve the needs of network administrators who operate in ‘clean room’ environments such as hospitals, laboratories, manufacturing facilities and others,” said Sampson Yang, CEO, ATEN Technology, Inc. “Beyond these specific environments, product protective antimicrobial nanocoating can benefit data centers and multi-user environments, as well as server rooms within libraries, schools or government facilities where protection is critical.”
Can you count the factual errors and logical fallacies in the above two paragraphs? I see at least five, maybe six, but I’ll close with a nod to one of my biggest pet peeves. All together now, chant it with me: Bacteria Are Not Viruses. Continue reading
Bacteria Catch Some Air
A recent paper in PNAS highlights the lengths – and heights – bacteria go to in order to find suitable habitats. Actually, the bugs in this case are simply hitching a ride on dirt, their usual environment, as it gets picked up into the jet stream during African dust storms. That dirt, and its associated microbes, blows all the way across the Atlantic and lands as far away as the US mainland.
That’s all old news, but the new report shows that the biodiversity of that dirt is nearly as high after its transatlantic trip as it was at the beginning, with hundreds of species of bacteria in it. This imported jungle includes representatives from some nasty genera, too, like Francisella sp. and Bacillus anthracis. That could explain why some highly sensitive “biodefense” detector systems keep sounding false alarms – they could just be detecting the harmless bacteria-laden dust that’s been blowing through our skies for centuries. Continue reading
Competition and Rotten Tricks
Microbes are consummate chemical warriors, producing numerous compounds that kill or repel their tiny competitors. The most successful antibiotics in medicine, for example, are almost all derived from naturally occurring chemicals that bacteria and fungi evolved to combat each other. But it seems this chemical warfare doesn’t stop at the microscopic scale, as Burkepile et al. show in the November issue of Ecology:
When we baited traps in a coastal marine ecosystem with fresh vs. microbe-laden fish carrion, fresh carrion attracted 2.6 times as many animals per trap as microbe-laden carrion. This resulted from fresh carrion being found more frequently and from attracting more animals when found. Microbe-laden carrion was four times more likely to be uncolonized by large consumers than was fresh carrion. In the lab, the most common animal found in our traps (the stone crab Menippe mercenaria) ate fresh carrion 2.4 times more frequently than microbe-laden carrion. Bacteria-removal experiments and feeding bioassays using organic extracts of microbe-laden carrion showed that bacteria produced noxious chemicals that deterred animal consumers. Continue reading