Space Station conditions are selective but do not alter microbial characteristics relevant to human health

Human space exploration beyond Earth and Moon is a declared goal of NASA, ESA, Roscosmos and other space-faring agencies, with human Mars mission envisioned in the near future. One of the major challenges of the mission is protecting the human crew from illness and infection caused by harmful biological contaminants. To evaluate these challenges in …

The report from Kaunas: ISES-ISIAQ 2019

Last week, the International Societies of Exposure Science and Indoor Air Quality had their joint meeting in Kaunas, Lithuania. The meeting featured a lot of great research on topics ranging from the thermal comfort of clothes to exposure to heavy metals from e-cigarettes and everything in between. While we can’t summarize the whole meeting here, …

Antimicrobial paints have a blind spot

Spore-forming bacteria survive on surfaces coated with antimicrobial, latex paints Antimicrobial paints kill most bacteria within 24 hours, but some survive Such products are typically tested on pathogens but not common bacteria like Bacillus Antimicrobial paints could favor antibiotic resistance — making harmless bacteria like Bacillus harmful EVANSTON, Ill. — Antimicrobial paints offer the promise of …

Man-made microbial resistances in built environments

Antibiotic resistance has been assessed to rise to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally. At the same time the number of people dying from antibiotic-resistant bacteria is increasing. The World Health Organization considers the spread of antibiotic resistance and appropriate countermeasures as one …

Development of antibiotic resistance under simulated microgravity

So just a quick post about this new paper “Evaluation of Acquired Antibiotic Resistance in Escherichia coli Exposed to Long-Term Low-Shear Modeled Microgravity and Background Antibiotic Exposure“.   Seems pretty straightforward… 1000 generations of E. coli in simulated microgravity… expose them to antibiotics and study the development of resistance.   This is in contrast to some previous …

Evolution happens: Bacteria becoming resistant to hospital disinfectants

Well, if true this is both troubling and not surprising: Bacteria becoming resistant to hospital disinfectants, warn scientists | Society | The Guardian The story reports on a paper in Science Translational Medicine. Some quotes: The results reveal that Enterococcus faecium bacteria have become more tolerant to alcohol over that time. “We found that the new …

A new, and scary, fungus among us #MoBE #Candida

Fascinating, scary and really important read from Maryn McKenna in Wired: The Strange and Curious Case of the Deadly Superbug Yeast By the normal standards of outbreak, Candida auris signals a mind-bending shift—and it’s forcing researchers draw on some of medicine’s oldest practices to rethink treatment.   The article tells the tale of Candida auris a fungus that …

Paper of interest: Predicting antibiotic resistance from full genome sequences 

This preprint seems like it may be of interest to folks: Precise prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli from full genome sequences | bioRxiv Basically, the authors showed that, using a machine learning approach, they can quite accurately predict antibiotic resistance in E. coli from whole genome data. The emergence of microbial antibiotic resistance …

An informative glimpse into the drug factory microbiome: Which bugs coexist with our drugs? The story behind the paper

The story behind: Toward the Drug Factory Microbiome: Microbial Community Variations in Antibiotic-Producing Clean Rooms (OMICS. 2018 Feb;22(2):133-144. doi: 10.1089/omi.2017.0091.) PMID: 28873001 [Preprint] It was in 2013, on my return to Cairo University after a couple of years as a visiting scientist at UCSD, that I met Amal for the first time. Amal was a fresh master’s …

New paper of interest on Hospital Plumbing and Carbapenem Resistance

New paper of interest:: Genomic Analysis of Hospital Plumbing Reveals Diverse Reservoir of Bacterial Plasmids Conferring Carbapenem Resistance Weingarten RA, Johnson RC, Conlan S, Ramsburg AM, Dekker JP, Lau AF, Khil P, Odom RT, Deming C, Park M, Thomas PJ, NISC Comparative Sequencing Program, Henderson DK, Palmore TN, Segre JA, Frank KM. 2018. Genomic analysis …