MicrobeWorld

Standing as the most densely populated city in the world, New Delhi has plenty of public health issues to deal with on a constant basis. But now health officials have some very urgent matters to deal with: new strains of super-bacteria, the most destructive of which contain the gene dubbed NDM-1... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier

Vincent and Dickson review how gut bacter... Read More

Trudy writes:

Dear Drs. Despommier and Racaniello,

I am almost caught up listening to TWiP! I look forward to your future efforts and eBooks, etc., however, in TWiP # 32, I thought I heard you mention that there would be a link to Dr. Despommier's lectures. ... Read More

Trine Tsouderos, Chicago Tribune reporter, has published a Q&A with several leading virologists on the controversy surrounding the potential impact of full publication of two studies on the airborne transmissibility of H5N1.

"Media reports about the controversy have been marked by frightenin... Read More

This exciting paper addresses a mystery in tumor virology as to how, Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV), a retrovirus that is frequently recovered in B cell lymphomas, contributes to oncogenesis. microRNAs have become a significant player in cell cycle regulation and tumorigenesis and are also express... Read More

About research that created a more contagious form of bird flu and the government's reaction. #twiv Read More

A deadly plague bacterium is able to transform the lungs into a breeding ground for other microbes—often escaping detection until it is too late for medical treatment.

Most other microbes that infect the lungs trigger an antimicrobial response within a few hours after infection. This early in... Read More

The use of probiotic bacteria, isolated from naturally-occurring bacterial communities, is gaining in popularity in the aquaculture industry as the preferred, environmentally-friendly management alternative to the use of antibiotics and other antimicrobials for disease prevention. Known to the p... Read More

Science writer Carl Zimmer has posted his notes from last night's New York Academy of Sciences "Dual Use Research: H5N1 Influenza Virus and Beyond" panel discussion on his blog The Loom. Zimmer's notes and observations reveal a real split in the science community over whether research on the air... Read More

What looks like a Native American dream catcher is really a network of social interactions within a community. The red dots along the inner and outer circles represent people, while the different colored lines represent direct contact between them. All connections originate from four individuals... Read More

El podcast del Microbio Nº253 deals with the sequencing of a Lactobacillus pentosus strain responsible of Spanish‐Style Green Ol... Read More

Mike writes:

Hello Men (and sometimes women) of TWiV!

I have read before that the human genome contains the genetic code of several thousand retroviruses. These retroviruses are in an inactive state, and are believed to be the product of infec... Read More

A team of biologists at the University of York has made an important advance in our understanding of the way cholera attacks the body. The discovery could help scientists target treatments for the globally significant intestinal disease which kills more than 100,000 people every year.

The dis... Read More

Natural selection is a kind of search engine. Given enough time, and suitably vast populations, it should find the best solutions repeatedly. So why are bacteria still bacteria? And why did all complex life on our planet share an ancestor that only arose once in four billion years? In this lectu... Read More

Yoshihiro Kawaoka, at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has authored a paper published in Nature that explains why the results from his research team on the transmissibility of H5N1 between ferrets should be published and openly accessible. Click "Source" to read t... Read More

One of the scientists at the centre of the controversy over the creation a highly dangerous form of bird flu which could cause a devastating human pandemic has denounced attempts by the US Government to censor the research over fears that the findings might be misused by bioterrorists.

Yoshih... Read More

mBio is publishing a special series of Commentaries this week in response to recent actions of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which recommended that two scientific journals withhold crucial details of upcoming relating to a novel strain of the bird flu virus, H... Read More

Persistent bacterial infections can make a mess of our bowels and the usual treatment method of adding antibiotics usually causes even more disruptions. Researchers, however, are fine tuning a treatment that involves adding a sample of the stool of another which jump-starts the infected patients... Read More

The arms race between a virus and the bacteria it attacks has helped scientists better understand one of the mysteries of evolution: How new traits evolve.

In a series of experiments, the bacteria-infecting viruses repeatedly acquired the ability to attack their host bacteria through a differ... Read More

What if diagnosing salmonella or colorectal cancer was as easy as looking in the toilet? Scientists and designers are collaborating to create a new type of bacteria that beautifies your fecal matter while diagnosing your illness.

We mentioned E. chromi, the color-coded designer bacteria made ... Read More