A plea to stop ignoring microbial ecosystem effects of antimicrobial agents

Well, the stories just keep coming about antimicrobial agents we can use to kill off some pathogen in our environment.  Today’s is about plasma – yes plasma – and how it can deactivate norovirus in the environment: ‘Cold plasma’ kills off norovirus from the BBC.   The article discusses a new study in the journal mBio.  Some key …

A very important paper for any interested in microbial ecology: importance of rare taxa

Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …

From the ASM mBio blog mBiosphere: Strep pneumoniae survival on surfaces

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is really doing a great job of moving into new forms of science communication.  For example, ASM has a relatively new journal mBIO that is sort of akin to PLoS One – it is an open access and relatively rapid publication journal.  And mBIO is starting to take off. …