MicrobeWorld

Bird flu viruses are potentially highly lethal and pose a global threat, but relatively little is known about why certain strains spread more easily to humans than others. Two studies published by Cell Press June 6th in the journal Cell identify mutations that increase the infectivity of H5N1 an... Read More

Now nearly a decade into her planned 3 month only expedition to Mars, NASA's longest living rover Opportunity, struck gold and has just discovered the strongest evidence to date for an environment favorable to ancient Martian biology – and she has set sail hunting for a motherlode of new clues a... Read More

Protocols and free how to advice from Lumiprobe on how to use Fluorescent dyes, Click Chemistry reagents, Life Science
-Click-chemistry labeling of oligonucleotides and DNA.
-NHS ester labeling of amino biomolecules.
-SYBR Green I staining of DNA in gels.
-qPCR with SYBR Gree... Read More

In this blog entry, I discuss a talk I attended at ASMCUE about "Citizen Science" and how some of my own work appeared in that talk! It is a vital that we scientists explain not just what we do, but why it is so fascinating to us...by involving the public! Read More

At the end of May, 1971, NASA undertook another one of its great leaps for humanity by launching Mariner 9, a satellite destined not for orbit around Earth, but Mars. Around the same time, a highly regarded professor at Cornell, Carl Sagan, hypothesized that Mars might have the potential to beco... Read More

A sugar polymer found on the cell surface of multiple pathogens could be key to developing a broad-spectrum vaccine. Developing new vaccines to protect against diseases that plague humans is fraught with numerous challenges—one being that microbes tend to vary how they look on the surface to avo... Read More

Plasmodium vivax is one of the human-infectious Plasmodium spp., transmitted by the female Anophele s mosquito. It is a major threat to health in Southeast Asia and South America, infecting a larger number of people than its more deadly cousin, Plasmodium falciparum.

Image: A fluorescent micr... Read More

In this blog post, I discuss how students begin to find their "path" to a career that they will love in science. I aIso write about the late, great Richard Feynman. Read More

When hijacking a garbage truck, one might as well make use of the trash. That logic drives how tuberculosis-causing bacteria feed, say Cornell scientists.
They report that bacteria-infecting macrophages – garbage trucklike immune cells – slow their hosts' trash-processing abilities to snack on ... Read More

Researchers apply a new experimental approach to visualize the turbulent motion of swimming bacteria and propose a minimal model that captures their observations.

Bacteria are among the oldest and most abundant living species on Earth, and their activity influences the planet’s environmental ... Read More

The life cycle of D. discoideum begins as spores that are released from a mature fruiting body. Read More

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

What draws a mosquito to bite its host has long been studied from the perspective of the victim—uncovering which smells and chemicals lure the insect in. But researchers at Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, headed by Robin Chemers Neustein Professor Leslie Vosshall, are aim... Read More

The first description of the 4-million-atom structure of the HIV’s capsid, or protein shell, could lead to new ways to fight the virus. The findings are highlighted on the cover of the May 30 issue of Nature.

“The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in... Read More

If half of a cell population were coloured white and the other half were coloured black, scientists should think all cells are grey. Conventional methods average over thousands of cells, overlooking any cell-to-cell variability. ETH scientists now measured metabolite levels in single yeast cells... Read More

New research from the University of Southampton shows that copper and copper alloys will rapidly destroy norovirus – the highly-infectious sickness bug. The virus can be contracted from contaminated food or water, person-to-person contact, and contact with contaminated surfaces, meaning surfaces... Read More

The life cycle of D. discoideum begins as spores that are released from a mature fruiting body. Read More

Regulator triggers efforts to standardize faecal transplants. The brown slurry is piped through tubes into the top of the human body — or the bottom. It can even come in pill form. For years, doctors have been transferring faeces into ill people’s intestines to replace resident microbes with a f... Read More

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

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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