MicrobeWorld

Our gastrointestinal (GI) tract harbors a rich ecological niche of an extraordinary amount and variety of microbes. Most of these microbes we keep around because they provide us nutritional, metabolic, or immunological benefits. How our body keeps in constant communication with these microbes to... Read More

Sir David Attenborough and the Planet Earth team discover the weird world of the Cordyceps; killer fungi that invades the body of an insect to grow and diminish the insect population. Fascinating animal and wildlife video from the BBC epic natural world masterpiece 'Planet Earth'. Read More

Microorganisms in the human gastrointestinal tract form an intricate, living fabric made up of some 500 to 1000 distinct bacterial species, (in addition to other microbes). Recently, researchers have begun to untangle the subtle role these diverse life forms play in maintaining health and regula... Read More

There’s been a lot of focus on the human microbiome recently, and while I’m obviously thrilled at anything which makes people think more about bacteria it’s easy to forget that it isn’t just humans who provide internal living space for bugs. Bacteria are everywhere, inside and among every living... Read More

Malaria’s impact worldwide is still an issue, particularly in developing countries. Research is ongoing to study the carriers of malaria, mosquitoes, and how they carry and transmit the disease and other pathogens. That’s why the 2010 winning image by Jonas King is so important to the life scien... Read More

Public health crises of the past decade — such as the 2003 SARS outbreak, which spread to 37 countries and caused about 1,000 deaths, and the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic that killed about 300,000 people worldwide — have heightened awareness that new viruses or bacteria could spread quickly across the... Read More

Public health crises of the past decade — such as the 2003 SARS outbreak, which spread to 37 countries and caused about 1,000 deaths, and the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic that killed about 300,000 people worldwide — have heightened awareness that new viruses or bacteria could spread quickly across the... Read More

Prosthogonimus macrorchis, a flatworm poultry parasite.

A digenetic trematode (family Prosthogonimidae) located in the oviduct and bursa fabricii of poultry in North America, particularly common in states bordering the Great Lakes. (http://www.medilexicon.com) Credit: Mr. Spike Walker

2010... Read More

As corals go, Fungia is fairly reliable, usually releasing its sperm and eggs two days after the full moon. Today was Day 3. “Sometimes we get skunked,” she fretted.

A reproductive physiologist with the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Hagedorn, 57, is building what is essentially a sperm bank fo... Read More

I guess it doesn't sting, which is a plus - clearly we need no more stinging/biting/blood-sucking creatures on this earth - but my real wonder is what's next, and why rat heart muscle? Read More

Eight years old, wiry and ponytailed, Precious Reynolds bounds from the elevator to the entrance of the pediatric intensive-care unit. She fidgets impatiently as she waits to be buzzed in, eager to return to the clinic where, by the ironclad expectations of 2,000 years of medicine, she should ha... Read More

With global attention focusing on London for the Games of the 30th Olympiad, a parallel competition of superlative ability has gone largely unnoticed. I’m referring, of course, to the Microbial Olympics, a truth-based but (largely) fictional test of microbial abilities published in Nature Review... Read More

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.

The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward... Read More

Manmade climate change is the main driver behind the unexpected emergence of a group of bacteria in northern Europe which can cause gastroenteritis, new research by a group of international experts shows.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, provided some of th... Read More

July 2012

Package Inserts Overstate Diagnostic TB Tests' Accuracy

Clinicians and laboratory professionals often rely on manufacturers' package inserts to assess the accuracy of diagnostic medical tests. However, package inserts frequently greatly overstate such tests' accuracy, according t... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and  Read More

Colm writes:

Do you plan to do any promotion of an #asv2012 hashtag for the meeting in Madison this year? I remember some limited tweeting from Minneapolis last year (in between melting into the sidewalk) but I think TWiV would be a great way to promote it ahead of ti... Read More

This episode: Each kind of animal needs its own specific microbes!

Downloa... Read More

oday, microprocessors are built with silicon. But tomorrow, they'll be built with something else.

This past week, with a paper published in the academic journal Nature Communications, researchers at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and the Swedish research institu... Read More

Here's your vocabulary word for the week: zoonosis. It describes an infection that is transmitted between species. For example, the disease that the husband and wife team of Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have written about in their new book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolica... Read More