microbiology

The 2009 Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates in Environmental Microbiology at UNLV is now accepting applications. This NSF supported program provides undergraduates with an opportunity to perform independent research under the guidance of a faculty mentor. Students will ... Read more

The other day, one of my commentors wrote that "a well-informed sixth-grader should be able to distinguish MRSA from E. coli".

Well, here's a nutrient agar plate with some of the bacteria that we isolated from a local creek last fall. We identified our bacteria by sequencing the 16S ribosomal DNA, but for various reasons, that I won't go into here, we don't know which sequences belong to which colonies.

HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun. I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I didn't get time to play with the site until today. Here's an example to see how it works. How do I use HealthMap? ... Read more

If you're old enough or you've taken microbiology, there's a chance that sometime in your life you heard of Legionaire's disease. This disease was caused a bacteria that inhabited the air conditioners in a hotel where several veterans held a conference. Naturally, it was the microbiologists who collected samples of the bacteria and figured out what was going on. Now, there's something else going on and I'm thankful to Mike ... Read more

I read about this in Bio-IT World and had to go check it out. It's called the Genome Projector and it has to be the coolest genome browser I've ever seen. They have 320 bacterial genomes to play with. Naturally, I chose our friend E. coli. The little red pins in the picture below mark the positions of ribosomal RNA genes (It's not perfect, at least one of these genes is a ribosomal RNA methyltransferase and not a 16S ribosomal RNA.) ... Read more

Well, probably getting a stipend to help you do it. And, the really cool thing is that's part of the deal! Hustle, hustle the deadline is March 7th, and all the contact info is below. The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Environmental Microbiology at UNLV is accepting applications. This grant provides students with the opportunity to work on a research project for a 10 week period with a faculty mentor. Students receive a $4000 stipend, round trip airfare, and housing in a UNLV dormitory. Mentors have projects in the following areas: ⢠... Read more

For the record: Chlamydia is NOT a virus. I am bummed. I like the little MicrobeWorld radio broadcasts, and the video podcasts are even more fun. But I was perusing the archives and I found this:

I could ignore this if it came from a different source, but MicrobeWorld is produced with ... Read more

During the past few Fridays (or least here and here), we've been looking at a paper that was published from China with some Β-lactamase sequences that were supposedly from Streptococcus pneumoniae. The amazing thing about these particular sequences is that Β-lactamase has never been seen in S. pneumoniae before, making this a rather significant (and possibly scary) discovery ... Read more

This is a multi-part series on antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Eventually, we'll reach the ways in which bacteria develop antibiotic resistance, but before we get there, we'll spend a little more time on antibiotics themselves.

What have we learned so far?

1. Antibiotics are natural products, made by bacteria and some fungi. We have also learned about the difference between antibiotics and synthetic drugs. There isn't always a clear distinction since chemical groups can be added to antibiotics, making them partly synthetic ... Read more

What's the difference between a synthetic drug and an antibiotic?

Sometimes there's no difference at all. Let's take a look at chloramphenicol and couple of pencillins.

Chloramphenicol kills many different kinds of bacteria by interfering with their ability to make new proteins. Here's a point where language gets tricky. Originally, chloramphenicol was isolated and purified from Streptomyces (a kind of bacteria). But, chloramphenicol is small and chemists are able to synthesize it. So even though we consider antibiotics to be natural products, they don't ... Read more