When I jetted off to South America a year and a half ago, my doctor sent me with a bottle of Ciprofloxacin in case of an unfortunate bout of food poisoning. I thought little of it then, but what does it mean when millions of travelers head to developing countries with antibiotics? You guessed it …
“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …
Bacteriophage therapy relies upon viruses of bacteria to treat bacterial infections. Prior to penicillin’s discovery, bacteriophage therapy was one of the major ways to treat bacterial infections. Virologist Felix D’Herelle pioneered this method in the late 1800’s in Paris and the former Soviet Union. Most of the literature on bacteriophage therapy is from Eastern European countries, …
Going through the list of Microbiology Blogs I have curated at microBEnet and going to try to feature one of them every day or so. And just going to do this alphabetically. Today’s blog: Antibiotics-The Perfect Storm Author: David Shlaes Tagline/Summary: We need new antibiotics to fight infections caused by resistant bacteria. But the marketplace, the structure of the …
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 …
Register Here Please join the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on August 14th from 11:00am-12:30pm EDT for the release of the report, Management of Legionella in Water Systems. The report examines what is known about Legionella occurrence in water systems, and makes recommendations for managing bacterial growth in these environments in order …
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 …
I am compiling information on past, present and future “Citizen Microbiology” projects. Basically I am looking for examples of projects that could fit VERY BROADLY into the concept of citizen or participatory science and involve microbes. Examples include: Participatory Research Classes such as SeaPhages https://seaphages.org Tiny Earth https://tinyearth.wisc.edu Human Microbiome Sample Crowdsourcing The American Gut Project http://americangut.org …
Days 4 and 5 of the meeting were a real mix of things including chemistry, evolution, and ‘omics. Also Kevin Bonham took fairly detailed notes throughout the entire conference and put those all online here, worth checking out if you want more detail. Started off the day with Mohamed S. Donia from Princeton University, “Small …
Day 3 of the meeting was virus day! Viruses have often gotten short shrift at these kinds of meeting, especially once 16S rRNA sequencing took over the microbial world. But the balance is shifting back, largely because of metagenomics. First up was Andrew J. Hryckowian from Stanford University “Bacteriodes thetaiotaomicron as a Chassis for Understanding …