MicrobeWorld

It is generally a mystery how new diseases arise and how the pathogens that cause them first enter countries. However, clues may come from examination of specimens from similar outbreaks. This approach has recently been taken by scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna to trac... Read More

Kal Penn has a pretty unusual resume: He has starred in Harold and Kumar, the most successful series of stoner movies made in the past decade; and has served in the White House as the Obama administration's liaison to youth. Now he's hosting a new show, The Big Brain Theory, on the Discovery Cha... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Britt Glaunsinger, and Read More

Synthetic biology delivers combination therapies into an uncertain market. “It’s been a dream project — but it’s been a long dream,” says Jay Keasling, a biochemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. Seven years ago, he and his team genetically engineered yeast to produce artem... Read More

Taking an approach similar to that used for discovering new therapeutic drugs, chemists at the University of California, Davis, have found several compounds that can boost oil production by green microscopic algae, a potential source of biodiesel and other "green" fuels. The work appears online ... Read More

In this blog entry, I discuss how marine microbiology is fascinating to students, as well as the topic leading me (via social media) to other marine microbiologists. One of those marine microbiologists made me a "shrunken coffee cup" (shrunken due to being carried below a kilometer of depth on ... Read More

El podcast del microbio Nº 373 summarize a recent article published in PLoS ONE on the active extracellular DNA release to the environment by Bacillus subtilis. El podcast del microbio Nº 373... Read More

It was a brew to rival any in “Macbeth.” The main ingredients were rat brain and a fearsome, carefully cultivated virus.

In his laboratory in Pearl River, N.Y., 20 miles north of Manhattan, Dr. Hilary Koprowski macerated the ingredients in an ordinary kitchen blender one January day in 1948. ... Read More

Scientist at the Rensselaer Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and the Rensselaer Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for the Directed Assembly of Nanostructures have created a coating that can selectively kill the bacteria Listeria, a causative agent of food borne illne... Read More

Intestinal dysbiosis may play a role in gastrointestinal (GI) disorders such as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in children, and prebiotics and probiotics may be efficacious for treating these conditions, according to Philip M. Sherman, MD, professor of pediatr... Read More

Bacteria on a surface wander around and often organize into highly resilient communities known as biofilms. It turns out that they organize in a rich-get-richer pattern similar to the distribution of wealth in the U.S. economy, according to a new study by researchers at University of California,... Read More

Background on structural analysis of bacterial proteins, from Erec Stebbins, speaker at the 2012 Holiday Lecture "Bacteria's Deadly Design: How Earth's most prevalent life-form uses a microscopic syringe to invade and attack."
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The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is proud to announce the 2012 award laureates. The awards will be presented during the 112th General Meeting of the ASM, June 16-19, 2012 in San Francisco, CA.

Abbott Award in Clinical and Diagnostic Immunology honors a distinguished scientist in th... Read More

Doctors can now get a peek behind the eardrum to better diagnose and treat chronic ear infections, thanks to a new medical imaging device invented by University of Illinois researchers. The device could usher in a new suite of non-invasive, 3-D diagnostic imaging tools for primary-care physician... Read More

A 65-year-old Frenchman is hospitalized after contracting France's first case of a deadly new respiratory virus related to SARS, and French health authorities said Wednesday they are trying to find anyone who might have been in contact with him to prevent it from spreading.

It's unclear how o... Read More

Think about the type of animal that would make an ideal host for a virus. It would gather in large dense groups, making it easier for the virus to jump into fresh hosts. It should have a relatively long lifespan, so any single individual has many chances of becoming infected. It would certainly ... Read More

Warnings about the emergence of another influenza virus may elicit scepticism, but we should not be complacent, cautions Peter Horby.

Once again an animal influenza A virus has crossed the species barrier to cause an appreciable number of human cases. Now, two months after the first known hum... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Amit Kapoor, Read More

Despite the desperate need for new antibiotics to combat increasingly deadly resistant bacteria, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only one new systemic antibiotic since the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) launched its 10 x ’20 Initiative in 2010 — and that d... Read More

Researchers at UC Davis have shown how the innate immune system distinguishes between dangerous pathogens and friendly microbes. Like burglars entering a house, hostile bacteria give themselves away by breaking into cells. However, sensing proteins instantly detect the invasion, triggering an al... Read More