MicrobeWorld

Despite improvements in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, Lyme borreliosis (LB) is still the most common arthropod-borne disease in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, with risk of infection associated with occupation (e.g. forestry work) and certain outdoor recreational activities ... Read More

Are there environments where there are abundant bacteria and no phages? Sounds like one of our Talmudic Questions, but this one has a specific answer, and that answer is Yes. That environment was found within a cystic fibrosis (CF) lung.

This story comes from a pair of papers recently publish... Read More

A one-page primer on the H1N1 flu and what you can do to protect yourself and your family. Read More

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its latest estimates on the number of new HIV infections in the United States. HIV remains a serious health problem, with an estimated 47,500 people becoming newly infected with the virus in the United States in 2010. About 12,000 youth... Read More

In resource-limited countries, a lack of training, proper reagents, supplies, and equipment has impacted their laboratories' ability to identify key pathogenic bacteria and detection of antimicrobial resistance. This has led to an environment of syndromic diagnosis by clinicians who have little ... Read More

Tracey McDole, a PhD student in the lab of Dr. Forest Rohwer, San Diego State University, has authored a post on Small Things Considered that looks at recent research published in PNAS that questions the physical limits to cell behavior.

"The word marginal means to be at the outer or lower l... Read More

Viruses can act as miniature couriers. When they infect, they may inadvertently take up a bit of their host’s DNA and have it copied into their progeny. When the offspring viruses move on to infect new cells, they may insert this bit of accidentally pilfered DNA into the new hosts’ genome. This ... Read More

Between early July and 22 August 2010, 81 cases of West Nile neuroinvasive disease were reported in the region of Central Macedonia, northern Greece. The median age of cases was 70 years. Encephalitis, meningoencephalitis or aseptic meningitis occurred mainly in patients aged 50 years or older. ... Read More

David Bhella, Ph.D., MRC Centre for Virus Research, accepts the Peter Wildy Prize for Microbiology Education, awarded annually by the Society for General Microbiology for an outstanding contribution to microbiology education. Read More

El podcast del Microbio Nº213 summarize the recent finding of marine bacteria that digest plastic published in Nature. El p... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, ... Read More

Many protozoan parasites (Trichomonas, Leishmania, Giardia, Plasmodium, Entamoeba, Nagleria, Eimeria, Cryptosporidium) are infected with viruses. These viruses do not infect vertebrates, but their double-stranded RNA genomes are sensed by the innate immune system, leading to inflammatory complic... Read More

Recently, Yale’s Richard Flavell led a team of researchers into the most talked about and yet one of the least understood of microbial environments—the human gut. Rather than present the usual metagenomic characterization of the microbial population, he teamed up with Jeff Gordon at Washington U... Read More

The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (S 810), which would prohibit the use of chimpanzees in medical research, may be voted on in the Senate this week (it was approved by a Senate committee in July). The purpose of this act is to phase out invasive research on great apes and the use of ... Read More

El Podcast del Microbio" Nº 149 is based in the Nature Physics article by W Roos y G.J.L Wuite. El Podcast del Microbio Nº ... Read More

In the Nº 104 of the "El podcast del microbio" I resume the recent findings on pathogenesis by Fusarium. En "El podcast del microbio" Nº 104 ... Read More

The title pretty much sums up the main thrust of the post, which also includes section on cheap, rapid diagnostic tests that not only can identify known pathogens, but provide quite a bit of information about novel pathogens (link to a great Pop!Tech video lecture by Ian LIpkin). There's also a ... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and Read More

The Nº 113 and 114 of "El podcast del microbio" summarize the Nature's article: "A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry". En "El podcast del microbio" Nº 113 y 114 se resume el artículo aparecido en la revista Nature: "A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry... Read More

What do microbes have to do with beer? Everything! Because the master ingredient in beer is yeast – a microbe – and every step in the brewing process helps the yeast do its job better. A new freely-available report; "FAQ: If the Yeast Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy: The Microbiology of Beer" ex... Read More