MicrobeWorld

Scientists are now be able to gain a reasonably accurate picture of the ocean's health and productivity about every week, all over the planet.

Researchers from Oregon State University, NASA and other organizations said today that they have succeeded for the first time in measuring the physiol... Read More

Julia A. Segre and her colleagues are on an expedition of sorts, collecting information about the diversity of species in an ecosystem.

But Dr. Segre isn’t off trapping insects in the woods somewhere or scooping up samples of plankton on an ocean voyage. The species she and her colleagues ar... Read More

Current tests to identify specific strains of infectious prions, which cause a range of transmissible diseases (such as mad cow) in animals and humans, can take anywhere from six months to a year to yield results – a time-lag that may put human populations at risk.

Now, a group of scientists... Read More

Pregnant women who are deficient in vitamin D may be at increased risk for developing bacterial vaginosis, a vaginal infection that may have harmful effects on the pregnancy, according to a report in The Journal of Nutrition.

Bacterial vaginosis is caused by an imbalance of the bacteria norma... Read More

Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Young colony on brain heart infusion. A virulent strain Read More

Vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) have been found in sewage sludge, a by-product of waste-water treatment frequently used as a fertilizer. Researchers writing in the open access journal Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica point out the danger of antibiotic resistance genes passing into the human ... Read More

The health of our skin — one of the body's first lines of defense against illness and injury — depends upon the delicate balance between our own cells and the millions of bacteria and other one-celled microbes that live on its surface. To better understand this balance, National Institutes of He... Read More

Intestinal permeability and an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine are both associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). These findings are revealed in a new study in the June issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Associati... Read More

The UK's National Center for Biology Eduction has an interesting experiment involving toilet paper, hot water and oyster mushroom starter culture.

"Gastronomes will no doubt be aware of the presence of an increasing range of exotic mushrooms on the supermarket shelves. In the Far East, oyster... Read More

Here's a nice demonstration video by Dr. Conor O'Bryne from the Dept. of Microbiology at National University of Ireland, Galway, showing how to perform a serial dilution on a liquid food sample (in this case raw unpasteurised milk). The raw milk sample is diluted down to 1/1000 in a sterile dil... Read More

Research has revealed a novel way to tinker with the life cycle of parasitic worms—suggesting new avenues to attack or prevent infections such as hookworm that plague an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide.

The findings, published May 25, 2009, in the Proceedings of the National Academy o... Read More

"Synthetic biology has already delivered engineered organisms that can churn out a malaria drug, cook up an ideal biofuel or act as biosensors, but questions remain about how such organisms can be eliminated from the environment after they have performed their task.

A team of US biotechnologi... Read More

From December 1, all manufacturers must test source water for the germs each week as is currently required for finished bottled water products. If tests prove positive for E. coli, companies must explain in writing how they eliminated the bacteria and retest samples before use.

According to a... Read More

This is an interesting story from RedOrbit on how geographic factors influence the genes of the acid loving extremophile Sulfolobus islandicus.

Sulfolobus islandicus, a microbe that can live in boiling acid, is offering up its secrets to researchers hardy enough to capture it from the volcani... Read More

Mycobacterium smegmatis colonies on lowenstein-jensen media (2x) Read More

In an article published in Science, teams from the Institut Pasteurand the University of Limoges, associated with the CNRS and Inserm, decipher for the first time the molecular mechanism that enables bacteria to acquire multi-resistance to antibiotics, and that even allows them to adapt this res... Read More

Imagine being able to detect in just a few minutes whether someone is infected with a virus. This has now become a reality, thanks to a new ultra-sensitive detector that has been developed by Ostendum, a spin-off company of the University of Twente.

The company has just completed the first pr... Read More

I was at a tech meeting hosted by Amazon Web Services to see how I may use some of their cloud computing services for this site. One segment of the presentation was devoted to customers who use AWS for their sites or work. The slide you see in this image comes from Michael Schatz, Researcher at ... Read More

I am a sucker for all microbe-related food items. I have never had stinky tofu before. Apparently, it is made by marinating the tofu in a brine of fermented vegetables. Here's a description of it from Wierd Asia News:

"From a distance, it is said that rotting garbage is as close as one can co... Read More

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found that an approved drug for treating rheumatoid arthritis reduces severe illness and death in mice exposed to the Influenza A virus. Their findings suggest that tempering the response of the body's immune system to influenza i... Read More