Maureen writes:

I love all your series (TWIM,TWIV, and TWIP) and learn immensely from them. I am a Clinical Research Nurse and work at NIH in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) unit that houses the KPCR  patients that you may have recently read about.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/superbug-stalked-nih-hospital-last-year-killing-six/2012/08/22/5be18b1a-ec66-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html

I'd like to hear a discussion about this isolate as you educate everyone so thoroughly. Our hospital has worked diligently to track and eliminate this organism from our hospital and we've just about succeeded but I'd still like to be better informed about KPCR. Thanks.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/148/148ra116.full

P.S. Please Please Please start a TWIB!! We work with so much that I still need to be educated about various bacteria.

Thanks immensely for all the education you give us.

Jim writes:

Hi Vincent and Friends,

Thank you very much for the informative and often imaginative discussions that take place in TWiM. It's a real pleasure to listen to such a quality, fun, easily accessible (and free!) source of microbial material. I'm sure you are often thanked for taking the effort to put it out there, but I wanted to add my voice. As a cell and molecular biology student it offers some wonderful connections and points of interest to my education.

My question relates to a recently published book by Trudy M. Wassenaar that I have been reading, titled "Bacteria: The Benign, the Bad, and the Beautiful." Has anyone read this book, and if so what are their thoughts on it? I would recommend it to those with a broad interest, or who need an introduction, like students such as myself. It offers an incredibly interesting and diverse description of bacteria and is easy to understand. I actually picked it up because it was recommended by the google+ "Microbiology" account (https://plus.google.com/u/0/109102265263486263584/posts).

Thanks again, and warm regards.

Steve writes:

TWiM Audio File with Interactive Transcription

Here is a link to a partial, video I created from the TWiM 06 audio file: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOXD_X6g_w. I created a video file from the audio file so that I could use the YouTube captioning tool to import an interactive transcript -- minutes five (5) through twelve (12). I created the time-coded transcript using an online tool called Subtitle-Horse, (http://subtitle-horse.com).

If you click the interactive transcript button on the button-bar (Like, Dislike, Add to, etc) just below the video player, you can see how the transcript works. The transcript is indexed, time coded to the audio.

Potential Benefit of Interactive Transcription

The time-coded transcript text could be parsed and placed in a database for easy query. Then all included audio/video files are text searchable and associated to the segment of the source audio/video clip.

Collaborative Transcription

On TWiV a number of people have completed or are working on transcripts. In my experience, transcription is a time intensive process. To lighten individual time commitment, it would be nice to get several people to work collaboratively to transcribe one TWiV audio/video. Although far from perfect, the subtitle-horse online transcription tool could be used for this.

Volunteer to Help Transcribe

Jeff writes:

Hello TWIMers -  In TWIM 26  I heard the listener email asking if you would consider offering continuing education credit for your podcasts, and you understandably cited the work that would you need to do (such as writing learning objectives, tests etc) as a real barrier to that.  I was wondering if you would consider "contracting" that kind of work out to some of your listeners; being a teacher of a microbiology class at a community college, I spend a large amount of time coming up with learning objectives, tests etc  anyhow, and it would help me to generate fresh material for my students from your podcasts.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were others in your listening base who might feel the same.  This still would add work for you, so I understand if its a no-go.

In a separate vein: quite a while ago I was doing dishes and listening to a TWIM.  As I was using a sponge to wipe off the counter a ridiculous question popped into my head (as opposed to my toe, I guess): are there strains of bacteria that can provide a protective commensal role on environmental surfaces?  A counter top is nothing like a biological surface, as only the latter should have organic material to eat on it, but still, is there any evidence in any situation that something like this happens?  Please read  the following sentence with extra emphasis: I am not fishing for an excuse to get out of doing the dishes, and I regularly boil our kitchen sponges and use bleach to clean the counters.

Keep up the great work!

Velma writes:

Dear TWIM-team,

Greetings from a longtime listener and fan of all three TWI-podcasts. I'm a biotechnology Masters student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, but I earn my living as a part-time driver in the world's most northern metro. Your podcasts help me pass the dull hours at work so that I feel like I'm doing something to advance my studies as well.

I've been thinking of writing for quite a while. Now that I'm finally doing it, I have a rather general suggestion and a link. The suggestion is, I'd like to hear more about the archaea - maybe even an entire episode dedicated to them. They seem like such a mystery. At least at my home university, they're almost always just mentioned as an aside, while the bacteria get all the attention. The one time they were actually discussed on a course, I learned that they are not just extremophiles, but actually all around us, just like bacteria. This made the fact that there are no pathogenic archeae seem even more curious to me.

As for the link, it's for the Earth Microbiome Project: http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/

I just ran across it today, and don't remember this project being mentioned on TWIM before. I think the idea is awesome, not to mention really ambitious, maybe even overly so. What do you think, is creating even a rough map of the microbiome of our entire planet an attainable goal? And would it be a useful resource for research?

Thanks for the inspiring and informative podcasts,

Velma

Elitza writes:

Dear TWiM Team,

I just finished listening to the TWiM 35 on LPS in Vibrio (among other topics). Dr. Elio Schaechter mentioned a field in Microbiology that I think is of great interest to the scientific community and should definitely be covered in a podcast. The topic is: Outer Membrane Biogenesis in Gram-negative bacteria. For decades people have been hypothesizing and trying to find an evolutionary link that would answer the following questions: how did a second membrane in bacteria come about and was the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) a single or double-membraned organism. These questions are extremely difficult to address and rely heavily on bioinformatics and phylogenetic analysis.

I'm the first author of the paper that I'm suggesting here as a resource for a potential podcast. I've read extensive amounts of scientific literature before the paper was finalized and published in Cell to realize that currently, there are no favored hypotheses and the very few hypotheses that exist are highly controversial. In our paper we structurally characterize (using electron cryo-tomography) the process of endospore formation. The process is typically thought of as exclusive to Gram-positive bacteria members of the phylum Firmicutes, however, we imaged a Gram-negative organism (Acetonema longum) that is also able to sporulate! Through our structural studies, phylogenetic profiling and biochemical analysis we showed that A. longum possesses a true outer membrane. Not only that, after sporulation, the spore is surrounded by two membranes both of which originated from the inner membrane of the mother cell. Upon outgrowth, the second membrane of the spore becomes the outer membrane of the bacterium and therefore is remodeled from and inner into and outer membrane. These are fascinating new results that may provide us with a missing link between Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and give insights into how an outer membrane may have evolved.

Here are a couple of links to the paper I'm suggesting and a commentary by Dr. W. Vollmer on this work:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21884938

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22173345

Thanks!

Fabio writes:

Dear Prof. Schmidt, I listened the podcast in Microbiology that you recently contributed together with Vincent Racaniello, Joseph John and Elio Schaechter. You made a very nice summary and commentary of the International Symposium on Staphylococci held last August in Lyon.

Furthermore, I would like to thank you for all your nice words about the symposium that we organized and on our recent opinion paper titled “Inferring reasons for the failure of S. aureus vaccines in clinical trials” and published in Frontiers Cell. Inf. Microbio.

Best wishes,

Fabio

Fabio Bagnoli, PhD

Project Leader

Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics

Alice writes:

Hey TWIM-MERs -- this is from a wildlife rehab newsletter, thought you might be interested:

MRSA in Wildlife

One of the most notorious and hard-to-treat bacteria in humans has been found in wildlife, according to a new study in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. Researchers isolated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in two rabbits and a shorebird. Wild animals may act as an environmental reservoir for the disease from which humans could get infected.

Molecular typing of the isolates showed that the shorebird carried a hospital-associated strain of MRSA, while the rabbits had community-associated strains. The rabbits' MRSA also was resistant to tetracycline, which is common in farm animals.

Perhaps most troubling of all was that one of the pigeons carried a Staphylococcus bacterium that, while still sensitive to methicillin, was resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin. "Vancomycin is used as a last resort in MRSA infections," says study co-author Shylo Wardyn, “and vancomycin-resistant staph strains are rare in humans.” Abstract: http://www.jwildlifedis.org/content/48/4/1069.abstractlink

Peter writes:

Happy Halloween greetings Twim Team.

For a slightly microbiology themed Halloween costume I constructed a Plague Doctor mask.

You can see its construction on the instructables site:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Plague-doctor-mask-for-Halloween-1/

Michael writes:

Hello, TWiM!

News Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering

Comment:  I feel like this issue is quite broad and interesting and was hoping that ocean geoengineering might be worth discussing.  It's my understanding that scientists are wary of such approaches, to say the least, but this event seems to demonstrate a certain necessity for the international community to come to terms with geoengineering and sort out strategies and methods.  As a layman, I'd be very interested in what you guys have to say!

Quick excerpt from the beginning of the article:

"A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

...

Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.

George is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc, whose previous failed efforts to conduct large-scale commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands led to his vessels being barred from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments. The US Environmental Protection Agency warned him that flying a US flag for his Galapagos project would violate US laws, and his activities are credited in part to the passing of international moratoria at the United Nations limiting ocean fertilisation experiments

Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming."

Thank you for the great podcasts,

Michael

Øystein writes:

Dear TWiMmians,

I just found the latest edition of Clinical Microbiology and Infection and read about a concept that is new to me: culturomics.

Maybe you'll be as intrigued as me by this concept. It contrasts well wil all the high-throughput-genomics hype these days. It might be a good article to put on the show (some day?).

Here are the links, I am happy to forward pdf's of the articles to you if needed.

Culturomics: a new approach to study the human microbiome

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1469-0691.12032/abstract

and

Microbial culturomics: paradigm shift in the human gut microbiome study

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1469-0691.12023/abstract

And again, thank you for three great show to walk, commute, run, bike and do housework to:)

All the best,

Øystein

Registrar in clinical microbiology

Vestfold municipal hospital, Tønsberg