MicrobeWorld

David Tuller, health journalist and Berkeley faculty member, has written a piece on the CDC's handling of CFS. His account draws from interviews, a close reading of a fraction of the 4608 epidemiologic studies that pop up on a PubMed search for “chronic fatigue syndrome,” and a review of many pa... Read More

Vincent, Rich, Karla, and Marilyn recorded TWiV at the 29th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Virology in Bozeman, where they discussed plant viruses and how they make plants resistant to adverse conditions, ... Read More

Robert H. Silverman, one of the authors on the study implicating the new human retrovirus XMRV as an etiologic agent of chronic fatigue syndrome, has written an excellent review article on the current status of research on the virus. The article is behind a paywall at Nature Reviews Urology, so ... Read More

The novel human retrovirus XMRV has been associated with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome. The nucleotide sequence of XMRV isolated from humans indicates that the virus is nearly identical with XMRV produced from a human prostate tumor cell line called 22Rv1. This cell line was deriv... Read More

Barbara Hyde writes:

In the discussion of copper, it should be noted that copper has long been added to marine bottom paints as an anti-fouling agent. Now however there is concern about deleterious environmental effects from its leaching out into the waters.

Barb... Read More

A continuación: enverdecimiento de los cítricos; calentamiento global y microbios del suelo antártico; revestimiento de antibióticos; y una planta, un hongo y un virus.

Enverdecimiento de los cít... Read More

This episode: Some ocean bacteria glow to attract those that eat them!

Dow... Read More

This episode: Sampling storm cloud microbial communities with hailstones!

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Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Sarah Connolly, Andrew Karaba, Read More

An article by Alan Derman, Project Scientist in Joe Pogliano’s lab at the University of California at San Diego, published on the Small Things Considered blog presents a point-by-point analysis of a paper "Quantitative genome-scale analysis of protein localization in an asymmetric bacterium" pub... Read More

Kristopher writes:

Dear TWIV,

As a developmental biologist and post-doc, I greatly enjoy your show which gives me both information and distraction from pipetting small volumes from one tube to another in the lab. Recently, my lab enjoyment was cut short by a w... Read More

Bryce writes:

I enjoyed your discussion of the Molecular Therapy paper in this week’s TWiV. My lab (and others) have worked on using virus particles as scaffolds to increase the immunogenicity of various targets for quite some time. One thing that wanted to point out ... Read More

TWiV 82 letters

Erik writes:

Yesterday I sent my Skype audio question again, and I think it worked this time. In my question I mentioned a particular youtube video. Here's the link if you want to see what I was referring to. It's only 5 minute... Read More

A second virophage has been identified. The name does not signify a virus that infects another virus – it means virus eater.
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El podcast del Microbio Nº194 is about the recent observation that the algae Closterium moniliferum could remove strontium... Read More

Science writer Carl Zimmer writes a masterful blog piece tracing the history of the study of ecosystems, from lakes to the human microbiome. Just one interesting fact: In their lifetimes, individual humans will produce about five elephants worth of microbes. Read More

When my laboratory discovered the cell receptor for poliovirus in 1989, many new research directions were suddenly revealed – such as creating a mouse model for poliomyelitis. One application we did not think of was to use the receptor to screen samples of drinking water for the presence of viru... Read More