MicrobeWorld

Using bacteria to ferry radioisotopes commonly used in cancer therapy directly into pancreatic cancer cells in mice, researchers in the US were able dramatically to reduce the number of secondary tumors that arise when the cancer spreads to other parts of the body (metastases).

Claudia Gravek... Read More

A 65-year-old man infected with a new SARS-like virus died of multiple organ failure on Monday in France.

He was the first French patient to die from the condition, which is known as Middle East Respiratory Symptom Coronavirus, or MERS-CoV. As of Wednesday, 49 people have been infected with t... Read More

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is bad enough, but what if drug resistance also gives bacteria the ability to fend off attacks by the immune system? In a study in mBio this week scientists identify a lose-lose situation with colistin and Acinetobacter baumannii: bacteria resistant to colisti... Read More

Usually, when you mention bacteria in connection with water, it’s a bad thing. But one Texas A&M engineering researcher believes the right bacteria are a natural weapon for fighting an emerging water contaminant: estrogen.

Increasingly sensitive methods of screening water for polluting substa... Read More

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a labo... 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

Here's my summary of the second day of ASM2013, an exciting day full of science.

Download Episode (... Read More

Over the past year, two experienced biologists at Oslo University have seen something that very few scientists experience. They have been sought out by a persistent stream of people from all over Norway who are asking for help.

"People so sick that they can barely stand up have come here to K... 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

Michael Pollan, food author, activist and journalism professor, wrote this week’s cover story about the organisms with which we share our bodies — and how we’re dependent on them. His book “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” came out last month. His last article for the magazine was ab... Read More

Vitamin C can kill drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) bacteria in laboratory culture, according to a new, surprising discovery by experts at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The research, published in Nature Communications, indicates that adding vitamin C to existing TB d... Read More

When San Diego city officials first brainstormed ways to clean up the bird guano at La Jolla Cove, they envisioned processes involving vacuuming or picking up the mess.

A Northern California business presented them with a different option: using bacteria that would eat up the bird poop natura... Read More

Using new advances in synthetic biology and our updated understanding of Martian geochemical conditions, we should be able to inoculate the planet Mars with specially designed extremophilic microbes in an attempt to start (or re-start) life on its surface. This could be the largest and most auda... Read More

A team of researchers has captured images of green alga consuming bacteria, offering a glimpse at how early organisms dating back more than 1 billion years may have acquired free-living photosynthetic cells. This acquisition is thought to have been a critical first step in the evolution of photo... Read More

Bacteria are single celled organisms that can do amazing things in multicellular groups, with complex coordinated behaviors emerging from the interaction of genetic networks, chemical environments, and the physics of cell growth. Last year I wrote about the work of Tim Rudge and Fernan Federici ... Read More

The field of synthetic biology is still in its infancy, with many of the most promising companies residing outside of public markets, but make no mistake: The bioeconomy is on its way. Just about everything and anything -- fuels, chemicals, oils, foods, pharmaceuticals, metals, and materials -- ... Read More

The sometimes deadly MERS-CoV virus has spread to Italy, the World Health Organization said in statements this weekend.

Sunday's announcement that two female patients had contracted the virus follows one Saturday that said a 45-year-old man, who had recently traveled to Jordan, had become inf... Read More

A team of researchers has captured images of green alga consuming bacteria, offering a glimpse at how early organisms dating back more than one billion years may have acquired free-living photosynthetic cells.

This acquisition is thought to have been a critical first step in the evolution of ... Read More

A simpler and faster way of producing designer bacteria used in biotechnology processes has been developed by University of Adelaide researchers.

The researchers have developed a new one-step bacterial genetic engineering process called ‘clonetegration’, published in the journal ACS Synthetic... Read More

The normally civil world of international health diplomacy was shattered yesterday, when Saudi Arabia complained that a patent taken out by Dutch scientists who isolated the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus was impeding Saudi efforts to track the virus within its own borders.

... Read More