MicrobeWorld

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier

Vincent and Dickson reveal... Read More

Bioluminescent art blends science and creativity to create images that can only be seen in the dark. What do you get when you add a chemical engineer, a graphic designer and a research scientist? Beautiful art. In a wondrous combination of nature and design, bioluminescent art involves using nat... Read More

There’s a surprising connection between HIV, Ebola, and viruses that infect organisms called archaea that grow in volcanic hot springs.

The viruses hijack the same set of proteins to break out of infected cells, new research shows.

In eukaryotes—the group that includes plants and animals—a... Read More

Here's my summary of the third day of ASM2013, wherein I met with neat people and ideas.

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UI-led team creates first comprehensive guidelines to reduce staph infections after surgery. Staph infections in hospitals are a serious concern, so much so that the term Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is as commonly known as MRI. Far less known is that in many of these cases... Read More

Now that the mammalian intestinal microbiome has been promoted to organ status, might not such stately respectability be granted to the gut microbiota of other metazoans? If looking for a worthy candidate for such recognition, one could not do better than to consider the varied communities dwell... Read More

Seeing how the Hepatitis C virus builds ion channels could help researchers find new drugs to fight the disease. Viruses are masters of minimalist design. With only a simple genome and a handful of proteins, a virus can hijack much more sophisticated cells and mimic many of the intra- and inter-... Read More

The Supreme Court said human genes isolated by scientists may not be patented, ruling unanimously today in a dispute weighing intellectual property associated with genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.

The dispute concerned a 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil ... Read More

Strains of E. coli that produce the Shiga toxin last longer in lake water. The toxin appears to help E. coli fend off predators. “The take-home lesson is that E. coli that produce Shiga toxin persisted longer in recreational water than E. coli that don’t produce this toxin,” says study leader Ge... Read More

A mechanism that cells use to group together and move around the body -- called 'chase and run' -- has been described for the first time by scientists at UCL. Published in Nature Cell Biology, the new study focuses on the process that occurs when cancer cells interact with healthy cells in order... Read More

Jessie writes:

Hi Vince and Dick!

Has anyone volunteered to do transcripts for TWIP? I love this show, and I'd love to be able to contribute in some way. Forgive me if transcripts already exist and I'm just not finding them on the website. If no one is already... Read More

From millions of random mutations, scientists identify a virus that could make gene therapy for inherited retinal diseases safer and more effective. A new delivery mechanism shuttles gene therapy deep into the eye’s retina to repair damaged light-sensing cells without requiring a surgeon to put ... Read More

Patients in Vietnam and other locations with central nervous system infections may well be suffering from the effects of a newly discovered virus. Researchers have detected a virus they're calling CyCV-VN in spinal fluid from 4% of 642 patients with central nervous system infections of unknown c... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Rich Condit Read More

The cell fragments play a role in the body’s first line of defense against bacterial infection, helping white blood cells grab blood-borne bacteria in the liver. Platelets may contribute to protection against bacterial infection, according to new research published today (June 16) in Nature Immu... Read More

Why was there a sudden drop in the incidence of leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages? To answer this question, biologists and archeologists reconstructed the genomes of medieval strains of the pathogen responsible for the disease, which they exhumed from centuries old human graves. Their result... Read More

In a piece of work carried out by the Carbohydrate Metabolism Research Team of the Institute of Agrobiotechnology (a centre jointly owned by the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre, the Spanish National Scientific Research Council-CSIC, and the Government of Navarre), the discovery has been ma... Read More

Pharmaceutical experts NSF DBA have created an interactive guide to hand washing.
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Because of their central importance to biology, proteins have been the focus of intense research, particularly the manner in which they are produced from genetically coded templates -- a process commonly known as translation. While the general mechanism of translation has been understood for som... Read More

Four more people have died from the MERS virus in Saudi Arabia, bringing the death toll from the SARS-like virus in the kingdom to 32, the health ministry has said.

A statement on the ministry's website said on Monday two people had died in the western city of Taif and the other two were pron... Read More