MicrobeWorld

June 24, 2009 12:30 – 1:30 PM

The emerging field of synthetic biology will allow researchers to create biological systems that do not occur naturally as well as to re-engineer existing biological systems to perform novel and beneficial tasks. As the science and its applications develop, a com... Read More

This episode: Bacteria unlike any other known life form!

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A post by Manuel Sánchez, host of the Spanish blog, Curiosidades de al Microbiologia, on an article entitled "Physical Virology " that appeared in Nature Phyisics, discuses the ideas and potential of a new discipline that studies viruses from a physical perspective.

"Viruses are able to spont... Read More

Efforts to expunge micro-organisms from spacecraft assembly cleanrooms, and the spacecraft themselves, inadvertently select for the organisms that are often the most fit to survive long journeys in space. This has the risk of thwarting the goal of avoiding contaminating other celestial bodies, a... Read More

Michael Yarmolinsky, Scientist Emeritus in the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, NIH, explores how the virulent, double-stranded DNA phage called Chi attacks only motile strains of bacteria.

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This episode: Bacteria extend little hairs that could help clean up radioactive contamination!

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Liesbeth writes:

Tomorrow starts the XVIII International Congress for Tropical Medicine and Malaria Conference here in Rio de Janeiro. I read Peter Hotez will be participating in a round-table session on “What is the future role of academic journals in the research, c... Read More

Here's a nice demonstration video by Dr. Conor O'Bryne from the Dept. of Microbiology at National University of Ireland, Galway, showing how to perform a serial dilution on a liquid food sample (in this case raw unpasteurised milk). The raw milk sample is diluted down to 1/1000 in a sterile dil... Read More

In this video Stephen L. Mayo, Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry, California Institute of Technology, discusses the challenges of designing new proteins that fold into a particular structure or perform a particular function. One method is to computationally design a protein based solely up... Read More

El Podcast del Microbio" Nº 159 : Herpes Simplex Virus-1. Read More

Now that we have experienced several months of the H1N1 pandemic, what have we learned about how it was handled? Watch Dr. Nicole Lurie (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and Dr. Kathryn Edwards (Vanderbilt University), discuss the public health responses to H1N1. Participants compar... Read More

Los ciclos de vida de los hongos son bastante complejas, con algunos que tienen fases sexuales, otros asexuales, y otros, ambas; y para complicar las cosas, las fases pueden llevar nombres diferentes. Es... Read More

El podcast del Microbio Nº 222 and 223 summarize two articles published in Medical Mycology about the finding of the ecolog... Read More

El podcast del Microbio Nº199 conmemorates the 50th aniversary of Yuri Gagarin spaceflight by describing some "microbial si... Read More

El podcast del Microbio Nº207 summarize Vincent Racaniello's post on the relationship between retroviruses and amyotrophic ... Read More

Last March, there was a measles outbreak in the Spanish town of Alicante due to the lack of effective vaccination as a result of... Read More

This episode: Plant viruses work together to infect better!

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Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics on Twitter) has a new post on his The Tree of Life blog that looks at why the paper "Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms" by Carl Woese and George Fox may be the most important paper (see http://www.pnas.org/content/74/11/5088.ful... Read More

Bacteria have been sexually promiscuous, swapping genes with gusto, for a very long time. More than 15% of E. coli's genome has arrived via horizontal gene transfer (HGT), with some 200 installments having turned up since it diverged from Salmonella 100 million years ago. And, as you are probabl... Read More

A general video from the The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia featuring microbiologist Sally Roberts. Read More