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

Nuestro invitado de hoy es el Read More

The genome of mysterious bacteria that lurk in hospital drains has been sequenced.

Low levels of the bacteria, known only as candidate phylum TM6, have been found in water systems around the world, yet because they could not be cultured in the lab, almost nothing was known about them.

The ... Read More

Two back-to-back papers were published last week that provide a detailed analysis of what it would take for avian influenza H5N1 and H7N9 viruses to switch to human receptors. A single amino acid change in the viral hemagglutinin protein is sufficient to quantitatively change binding of the viru... Read More

Viruses in gut confer antibiotic resistance to bacteria. Bacteria in the gut that are under attack by antibiotics have allies no one had anticipated, a team of Wyss Institute scientists has found. Gut viruses that usually commandeer the bacteria, it turns out, enable them to survive the antibiot... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists discover highly asymmetric and branched patterns are the result of physical forces and local instabilities; research has important implications for understanding biofilms and multicellular systems.

Despite bacterial colonies always forming circular shapes as they grow, their cells... 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 new technology under development by an academic–industry partnership protects oral vaccines from destruction by the digestive system. From the mouth to the small intestine, the digestive system presents a series of challenges designed to protect us by killing ingested bacteria. If a microbe su... Read More

A new study shows that common mutant forms of the deadly JC polyomavirus are not responsible for the pathogen’s main attack, which causes a brain-damaging disease in immunocompromised patients called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. But that finding raises the ominous question of what... 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