Podcasts about microbe magazine

Mistranslation? Awkward. Surprisingly, it was a classic mistranslation after the Franco-Prussion War that prompted the acceptance of biosafety. Now, we keep dangerous pathogens locked up tight! And their identities might surprise you… Depending on the biosafety level, lab techs might wear special ventilation suits or even decontaminate their clothes. But these extreme measures are only used against the world's most dangerous viruses and bacteria. Shockingly, protocols for the infamous new coronavirus aren't as strict as they are for dangerous space rocks!   Written and recorded by Brenna Biggs. References: Ahern, H. Biosafety Practices and Procedures for the Microbiology Laboratory. Milne Library (Retrieved 2020). Biosafety Labs: What Are Biosafety Labs? National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (2011). Biosafety worldwide: Historical Background. Belgian Safety Server (2020). Ullmann, A. Pasteur-Koch: Distinctive Ways of Thinking about Infectious Diseases. Microbe Magazine (2007). What Is considered a Level Four Disease? Aftermath (2017).

Host: Jeff Fox with special guests, Julia Yeomans and Vikas Berry. Julia Yeomans of Oxford University in the United Kingdom and chemical engineer Vikas Berry of the University of Illinois, Chicago, talk with Jeff Fox about their separate, but in some ways similar, research efforts in which they use bacteria to perturb and probe the physical properties of simple machines, in one case, and unusual materials, in the other. Yeomans and her collaborators are developing models of miniature windfarms in which 64 rotors are arrayed regularly within a symmetric lattice, to which actively swimming bacteria are added. Under appropriate constraints, the bacteria spontaneously organize in such a way that they induce neighboring rotors to spin in opposite directions. Single rotors would be "kicked around randomly," the researchers say, but the arrayed rotors form "a regular pattern." Yeomans says, "Nature is brilliant at creating tiny engines, and there is enormous potential if we can understand how to exploit similar designs." Berry and his collaborators aligned rod-shaped gram-positive bacteria and then vacuum-shrunk a graphene sheet over them, thus forming nanoscale ripples into the otherwise smooth graphene surface. "The current across the graphene wrinkles is less than the current along them," says Berry. "We envision that with graphene one could make the smallest wavelength wrinkles in the world—about 2 nanometers. The structure is different, and the fundamental electronic properties are new." This story was featured in the September 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet Jeff your questions about this episode or just say hi!

Host: Jeff Fox with special guest, Emma Wilson. Emma H. Wilson of the University of California, Riverside, talks with Jeff Fox about efforts, with her collaborators to determine more precisely how Toxoplasma gondii parasites disrupt the mammalian brain—in this case, the brains of mice. This same parasite infects about one-third of the human population, but is held in check by the immune system unless those host defense mechanisms become impaired. Wilson and her collaborators find that these parasites interfere with the cycling of the neurotransmitter glutamate within the central nervous system, blocking its uptake by astrocytes, widely distributed cells within brains that are intertwine with and thus work very closely with neurons, which are the main cells for transmitting nerve impulses throughout the central nervous system.  Some damaging effects of the parasites can be reversed by treating the mice with a drug—in this case, it happens to be an antibacterial drug but here acts by a separate mechanism-- that helps to restore the glutamate transport protein in astrocytes. In this way, it partly corrects that glutamate imbalance within the brain. This story was featured in the August 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet me your questions about this episode or just to say hi!

Host: Jeff Fox with special guests, Carolyn Shore and Ruben Tommasi. Carolyn Shore of Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., and Ruben Tommasi of Entasis Therapeutics in Waltham, Massachusetts, talk with Jeff Fox about what’s needed to identify and develop new antimicrobial agents to treat infections caused by bacterial pathogens, with an emphasis on gram-negative bacterial pathogens.  According to that recent report from Pew Charitable Trust, which is based in Philadelphia, the challenges facing developers of such antibiotics fall into four main categories: developing a better understanding of the workings of gram-negative bacterial pathogens, a shortage of candidate drugs whose chemical design focuses on bacterial pathogens, an assessment of non-traditional efforts to control microbial infections, and an overview of what’s needed in terms of expertise and of sharing information among investigators in this field to meet these challenges. This story was featured in the July 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet me your questions about this episode or just say hi!

Host: Jeff Fox with special guests, Gemma Reguera and Geoffrey Gadd. Gemma Reguera of Michigan State University in East Lansing and Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee in Scotland talk with Jeff Fox about their efforts, to probe some of the electrical properties of materials produced naturally by specific microorganisms. Thus, Geobacter bacteria make protein filaments, called pili, that act as nanowires, transporting 1 billion electrons per second, according to Reguera and her collaborators. Analytic evidence suggests that the electrons move along these proteins by a thermally activated, multistep hopping mechanism, enabling these bacteria to draw electrons from the extracellular milieu. Meanwhile, the fungus Neurospora crassa can transform manganese into a mineral composite with favorable electrochemical properties. The fungal cells produce filaments that take up manganese, which after heat treatment forms structures that have electrochemical properties that are suitable for use in supercapacitors or lithium-ion batteries. The carbonized fungal biomass-mineral composite has excellent cycling stability and retains more than 90% capacity after 200 cycles, according to Gadd and his collaborators. This story was featured in the June 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet me your questions about this episode or just say hi!

Host: Jeff Fox with special guests, Ron Milo and Shai Fuchs. Ron Milo of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, talk with Jeff Fox about their efforts, with Ron Sender at Weizmann, to redetermine the ratio of microbial to human cells. This ratio, widely cited as being 10 to 1, is closer to even, they find, while arguing that it may prove helpful in the long run to have a better and more rigorous grasp of how many cells there are in both the host and the microbiome. Milo, Fuchs, and Sender update the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, “showing that the number of bacteria in our bodies” is instead “of the same order as the number of human cells. Indeed, the numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favor human cells over bacteria.” Thus, the total number of bacteria in the ″reference man″ is about 3.9 x 1013 with an uncertainty of 25%, and a variation over the population of 52%. For human cells, they find that the hematopoietic lineage of cells plays a “dominant role, accounting for about 90% of all body cells. They also revise estimates to the a new total of 3.0 x 1013 human cells in a 70-kg ″reference man″ with a 2% uncertainty. This story was featured in the May 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet me your questions or just let me know you heard this episode! Image: Colored transmission electron micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA are among the drugresistant pathogens that are drawing researchers to look at how such resistance moves through the environment (see p. 201). (Image © Credit: Biomedical Imaging Unit, Southhampton General Hospital/Science Source.)

Host: Jeff Fox with special guest, Jon Telling. Jon Telling of Bristol University in Bristol, United Kingdom talks with Jeff Fox about his findings suggesting that the grinding of glaciers over rocks can liberate hydrogen, which, in turn, drives the growth of methanogens within microbial ecosystems. Telling and his collaborators provide evidence that the grinding of rocks beneath glaciers can free hydrogen gas from minerals in those rocks. In turn, that hydrogen provides energy to furnish the metabolic needs of particular microorganisms, called methanogens, that produce methane and other organic molecules from carbon dioxide through a non-photosynthetic process. “This is an important new mechanism for hydrogen production,” says Christopher McKay, senior planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who was not involved in conducting this research. “Water-water reactions producing hydrogen are usually associated with high temperature systems, and it has been thought that they could not operate at low temperatures. This shows how hydrogen can be produced in an ice-covered system and has huge implications for ice-sealed Antarctic ecosystems such as Lake Vida and for the ice-covered ocean moons of the outer Solar System, Europa and Enceladus.” The research also has important implications for subglacial environments that acted as refuges during the early history of our planet, enabling microorganisms to survive during the Neoproterozoic glaciations, also called Snowball Earth. This story was featured in the April 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org Tweet me your questions or just let me know you heard this episode!

Host: Jeff Fox with special guest, Timothy Lu. Lu, an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, talks with Jeff Fox about efforts to develop new phage varieties, swapping in phage tail genes that enable them to target specific bacterial pathogens, including those carrying virulence or antibiotic resistance factors. Lu and other members of the MIT team worked with T7 phages that ordinarily act only against Escherichia coli. However, by substituting genes from other phages for the T7 gp17 gene, engineering them to target other bacteria, including pathogens such as Yersinia and Klebsiella. “We used this technology to redirect E. coli phage scaffolds to target pathogenic Yersinia and Klebsiella bacteria, and conversely, Klebsiella phage scaffolds to target E. coli by modular swapping of phage tail components,” Lu says. Phages also can be used to speed diagnostic testing of clinical as well as environmental and food pathogens, and such diagnostic tools might be needed to optimize the use of narrow-range antimicrobial products that target very specific bacterial pathogens , he points out. This story was featured in the January 2016 issue of Microbe Magazine. Subscribe to MMP (free) on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Send your microbiology questions and comments (email or audio file) to jfox@asmusa.org.

Paul Kelton of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, talks with Jeff Fox about the introduction of infectious diseases among Native American populations.  Kelton’s book Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: an Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824, published in April 2015 by the University of Oklahoma Press, looks at how Native American communities responded to new diseases, including establishing quarantines, to protect themselves against smallpox and other diseases. He offers evidence that the high mortality rate ascribed to smallpox in native populations had as much to do with cultural factors and the ferment of trade and warfare during the colonial period, as to any lack of immunity to the new disease. Kelton also discusses the question of whether Europeans may have means to deliberately infect Native Americans. This story was featured in the July 2015 issue of Microbe Magazine. 

Pandemic H1N1 virus may be or may soon become endemic in large modern swine confinement facilities.  Despite this, there is a paucity of influenza surveillance that is currently being conducted among swine populations.  Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine interview Dr. Gregory Gray, University of Florida, Gainesville, about the importance of conducting influenza surveillance among pigs and workers in these facilities in hopes that we might quickly detect the emergence of novel influenza viruses. This video was recorded live on May 25, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.

Pandemic H1N1 virus may be or may soon become endemic in large modern swine confinement facilities.  Despite this, there is a paucity of influenza surveillance that is currently being conducted among swine populations.  Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine interview Dr. Gregory Gray, University of Florida, Gainesville, about the importance of conducting influenza surveillance among pigs and workers in these facilities in hopes that we might quickly detect the emergence of novel influenza viruses. This video was recorded live on May 25, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.

Pandemic H1N1 virus may be or may soon become endemic in large modern swine confinement facilities. Despite this, there is a paucity of influenza surveillance that is currently being conducted among swine populations. Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine interview Dr. Gregory Gray, University of Florida, Gainesville, about the importance of conducting influenza surveillance among pigs and workers in these facilities in hopes that we might quickly detect the emergence of novel influenza viruses. This video was recorded live on May 25, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.

Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine talk with Arturo Casadevall, MD, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of mBio, the new online, open-access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, about an opinion/hypothesis article he co-authored suggesting that rising global temperatures will result in new fungal infections for mammals living in temperate climates. This video was recorded live on May 24, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.

Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine talk with Arturo Casadevall, MD, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of mBio, the new online, open-access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, about an opinion/hypothesis article he co-authored suggesting that rising global temperatures will result in new fungal infections for mammals living in temperate climates. This video was recorded live on May 24, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.

Watch Dr. Jeff Fox, Features Editor for Microbe Magazine talk with Arturo Casadevall, MD, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of mBio, the new online, open-access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, about an opinion/hypothesis article he co-authored suggesting that rising global temperatures will result in new fungal infections for mammals living in temperate climates. This video was recorded live on May 24, 2010, at the American Society for Microbiology's 110th General Meeting in San Diego, Ca.