MicrobeWorld

Many ladies love their handbags and will spend a lot of money for the latest and greatest, but a new study says what is inside those bags may be covered in germs worse than what you’ll find in the bathroom.

As CBS 2′s Cindy Hsu reported Wednesday, the study said your purse may, in fact, have ... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier

Vincent and Dickson consid... Read More

The tiny thymus teaches the immune system to ignore the teeming, foreign bacteria in the gut that helps you digest and absorb food, researchers say.

When immune cells recognize essential gut bacteria as foreign, inflammatory bowel disease such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease can be ... Read More

The African clawed frog, a species used around the world for biomedical research, is spreading an amphibian-killing fungus when they are released into the wild. In a new study, researchers provide the first evidence that the frogs in California harbor a fungal infection that is decimating amphib... Read More

A new approach to treating antibiotic-resistant infections has been developed by University of Wollongong (UOW) and University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) researchers who have patented the new technology and entered into commercialization discussions with two French pharmaceutical companies.

A... Read More

In 2008 researchers from the University of Southern Denmark showed that the drug thioridazine, which has previously been used to treat schizophrenia, is also a powerful weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococci (Staphylococcus aureus).

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is... Read More

Whether the microorganisms routinely inhabit the upper troposphere -- perhaps living on carbon compounds also found there -- or whether they were simply lofted there from the Earth's surface isn't yet known. Airborne microbes are of interest to atmospheric scientists, because they could play a r... Read More

Researchers have engineered a strain of electricity-producing bacteria that can grow using hydrogen gas as its sole electron donor and carbon dioxide as its sole source of carbon. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst report their findings at the 113th General Meeting of the A... Read More

Tommy writes:

Hi Vincent and Dickson,

I was listening to the new episode of TWiP (episode 52) and one of your listeners wrote in asking about tree parasites. While plant parasite is not my main field of research, I have written about one such pa... Read More

There have been 131 confirmed human infections with avian influenza H7N9 virus in China, but so far there is little evidence for human to human transmission. Three out of four patients report exposure to animals, ‘mostly chickens‘, suggesting that most of the infections are zoonoses. Whether or ... Read More

Microbial ecology may be a young field but it is well understood already that there is a broad spectrum of interactions between bacterial species, ranging from cooperative to competitive. In a recent paper researchers from John Mekalanos’ lab further characterized a recently discovered mechanism... Read More