MicrobeWorld

A new analysis of the current swine-origin H1N1 influenza A virus suggests that transmission to humans occurred several months before recognition of the existing outbreak.

The work, published online in Nature June 10, highlights the need for systematic surveillance of influenza in swine, and ... Read More

In episode 36 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Dick Despommier and guest Hamish You... Read More

Studying the ecology and distribution of plants does not take place solely in the forest. A new way of searching in scientific databases has enabled researchers from the University of Gothenburg to discover kinship between fungi from Sweden and Thailand - and has revealed some species with incor... Read More

Chicken takes the cake as the most common source of food poisoning in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report released today. The report, which analyzed data from 2006's outbreaks of foodborne illnesses in the U.S., found that chicken caused 21 percent of the 27,634 reported ca... Read More

Jurassic Park of bacteria?

Tiny microbes that have been buried below nearly two miles of ice for at least 120,000 years have been revived in the laboratory, in a study that raises the prospect that similar life forms could have survived on other planets.

Scientists have found at least two ... Read More

Top awards in last month's Intel International Science Fair go to Tseng I-Ching from Taiwan who discovered 'red bacterium' that metabolizes polystyrene.

I blogged about a Canadian student's discovery of plastic-eating microorganisms last May. Just last month, another 16-year-old high school s... Read More

I came across this on EurekAlert today and I wonder if this will really be an effective use of $1.6 million dollars. What do you think?

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health are conducting a study to determine if collaborative virtual environments improv... Read More

Almost 90 per cent of the world's population will not have timely access to affordable supplies of vaccines and antiviral agents in the current influenza pandemic, but it is possible that inexpensive generic drugs that are readily available, even in developing countries, could save millions of l... Read More

Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis AG said Friday it has successfully produced a first batch of swine flu vaccine weeks ahead of expectations.

The vaccine was made in cells, rather than grown in eggs as is usually the case with vaccines, the company said.

The announcement comes a day a... Read More

Al Gore's interactive, old school broadcasting meets new media, website Current.tv has highlighted a recent interview on deliatheartist.com with science comedian Brian Malow.

Two years ago, MicrobeWorld actually caught up with Malow at an event at the Koshland Museum in DC in which he present... Read More

Some disease-causing bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics because they have peculiar sex lives, say researchers publishing new results in the journal Science. The new study helps scientists understand how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, which is a major challenge for those ... Read More

A letter to Nature by researchers from the Universities of Hong Kong, Edinburgh, Arizona, and Oxford claims "a phylogenetic estimate of the gaps in genetic surveillance indicates a long period of unsampled ancestry before the S-OIV [H1N1] outbreak, suggesting that the reassortment of swine linea... Read More

A press release via EurekAlert issued by Howard Hughes Medical Institute:

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are reporting the first detailed molecular snapshots of a deadly gastrointestinal virus as it is caught in the grasp of an immune system molecule with the capacity to destroy ... Read More

"Bacteria have very peculiar sex lives. When humans have kids they mix up their DNA with that of their partner, but bacteria can pick up DNA from all sorts of places, even other species. Our research shows that bacteria which do this, that is undergo sex, with their own and other species are mor... Read More

Just when you thought that everything conceivable has been written about Charles Darwin on his bicentennial, a revealing perspective on his wife, Emma, appeared in the journal International Microbiology. Written by the distinguished science writer Mercé Piqueras, the article sheds light on many ... Read More

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued the following statements today in response to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision to raise the pandemic threat level on the novel H1N1 vi... Read More

A government report on food hygiene and safety said that many vegetables and fruits contain pesticides and chemicals, meats and meat products contain bacteria and over 60 million Vietnamese people have parasitic worms in their bodies.

Random tests of fruits and vegetables in Hanoi and Vinh Ph... Read More

Sick but still going to work? You'll probably end up taking more sick days in the future than colleagues who stay at home when unwell, according to a Swedish study.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm found that employees who often go to work feeling sick -- termed "sickness... Read More

Scientists have used genetic engineering to tame one of the most deadly food poisoning microbes and turn it into a potential new way of giving patients medicine and vaccines in pills rather than injections. The study is in the current issue of ACS’ Molecular Pharmaceutics, a bi-monthly journal.
... Read More

A soil microbe that uses chemical warfare to fight off competitors employs an unusual chemical pathway in the manufacture of its arsenal, researchers report, making use of an enzyme that can do what no other enzyme is known to do: break a non-activated carbon-carbon bond in a single step.

The... Read More