MicrobeWorld

On episode #66 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent and Dickson continue virology 101 with a discussion of information flow from RNA to DNA, a process known as reverse transcription, ... Read More

Bigthink.com has posted a 45 minute panel discussion on swine flu and the next pandemic. Moderator and editorial chairman for Bigthink.com, Paul Hoffman prefaces the discussion by saying:

"The reason we are here today is of course to di... Read More

On episode #63 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Alan, and Rich talk about US government contract for freeze-dried smallpox vaccine, red squirrels in the UK threatened by poxvirus... Read More

Franklin M. Harold, Department of Microbiology, University of Washington has authored an interesting guest post on www.SmallThingsConsidered.us that examines the process of cell structural organization and assembly:

"Structural organization is one of the most conspicuous features of cells, a... Read More

In what appears to be a warming world, understanding how plants can tolerate and prosper at elevated temperatures is an intriguing topic. Small Things Considered's Associate Blogger Mark O. Martin looks at the symbiosis between panic grass, a virus, an endophytic fungus, and elevated temperature... Read More

A film commissioned by the U.S. Air Force that shows a demonstration of what happens during the course of a Salmonella outbreak. The video examines source and means of contamination, factors aiding the survival and transfer of the organism, conditions of environment and general food handling pra... Read More

Vincent and Dickson introduce the obligate intracellular protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, one of the most successful parasites on earth.

Host links: Read More

The Small Things Considered blog has just started a three-part series on oomycetes, also known as water molds.

The first piece (published today) describes oomycete biology, the other two will focus on a particular oomycete: the late potato blight pathogen.

Here's a clip:

"As you know, ... Read More

Elio Schaechter of Small Things Considered asks if there is an evolutionary advantage for budding, where cell division is asymmetrical (yeast is an example), over binary fission, asexual reproduction by cell division?

Snippet:

"Binary fission is a most impressive invention. In one fell swo... Read More

This year I started a new virology course at Columbia University. The course emphasizes the common reactions that must be completed by all viruses for successful reproduction within a host cell and survival and spread within a host population. The molecular basis of alternative reproductive cycl... Read More

Alan Cann, senior lecturer at the University of Leicester, and colleagues Jo Badge, Stuart Johnson and Alex Moseley, have just published an article/paper on a small experiment involving student use of the microbloging service Twitter and its role in academia. Specifically, Cann and colleagues lo... Read More

James writes:

One of the other science based podcasts I love listening to is an actual radio show in NZ called Our Changing World. This week the final story was on Hookworms and some researchers studying it, looking for a vaccine, and seeing if they could take out ... Read More

I have been using twitter (@Microblogology) as a way to keep in touch with some of my online friends for awhile now. Eventually my occasional tweets involving microbiology caused me to be "discovered" by Chris Condayan (@MicrobeWorld) and I was quickly followed by some other people in the scien... Read More

On episode #85 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent and Michael Gale discuss the origin, pathogenesis, prevention, of hepatitis C virus, and how it evades innate immune responses.

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On a recent episode of TWiV, we posed the question, 'Can computer viruses evolve'? and asked listeners to weigh in. The author of the blog nostacktrace spent some time thinking about this issue and concludes that the evolution of real computer programs doesn't really work. Software instructions ... Read More

In the Nº 100 of the "El podcast del microbio" I deal with Helicobacter pylori and its relationship in the origin of some tumors En el programa Nº 100 de "El podcast del microbio" se habla de la bacteria Helicobacter pylori y su relación como posible agente causal de diversos cánceres.

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Frederick C. Neidhardt, F.G. Novy Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan Medical School at Ann Arbor, authors a post at the Small Things Considered blog on the dawn of proteomics, the large-scale study of proteins, with a f... Read More

Small Things Considered co-blogger Merry Youle has a post about the diversity of life in McKelvey Valley, a broad, glacially-carved pass just west of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. Her writing is inspired in part by a recent paper from the University of Hong Kong (See Read More

An hour on the life and work of Charles Darwin with James Watson, chancellor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and E.O. Wilson, professor emeritus, Harvard University. This aired on the Charlie Rose show on PBS. 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