Adventure Travel Guide to the Microbial World

Earlier this month, in the class lecture, "Staying Healthy: Hide Your Metal", Dr.

            This week, I attended a seminar from the VI4 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which hosted Dr. Carolyn Ibberson from Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a current faculty candidate for Vanderbilt and her presentation was titled “Insights into S.

Insects inhabit our world, acting as agricultural pollinators and pests, as well as vectors of diseases. As common disease vectors, mosquitoes have been identified as one of the deadliest organisms in the world [1]. In a recent lecture, Dr.

In the podcast “This Week in Microbiology” the hosts Vincent Racaniello and Michael Schmidt discussed a scientific paper on a novel synthetic dual drug called sideromycin that is used to combat Gram-negative bacteria.

The rise of antibiotic resistance constitutes a very real and growing global health threat.   Between 2000 and 2020, only 24 new antibiotics were approved by the FDA, an alarming decrease from the 63 antibiotics approved in the preceding twenty years1. However, there is still hope for solutions to this crisis.

            One of the unfortunate side effects of taking antibiotics to clear bacterial infection is its effect on the body’s microbiome. Antibiotics are generally nonselective in their targets; being put on a regimen of antibiotics can kill off an infection, but it will likely also cause harm to the beneficial bacteria of the patient (Dethlefsen et al., 2008).

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a notorious opportunistic pathogen best known for causing lung infections in patients with cystic fibrosis and compromised immune systems. Interestingly, this pathogen has the capability of communicating with other bacteria via a phenomenon called quorum sensing. P. aeruginosa produces metabolites, often termed autoinducers, that accumulate during growth.

            There has been much debate as to whether viruses constitute living organisms. In a magazine article from the Microbiology Society titled “Are Viruses Alive”, two microbiologists discussed whether viruses should be considered living organisms. Nigel Brown, the first interviewee, explains that viruses need a host cell to replicate, which goes against one of the eight characteristics of life.

Coronaviruses (CoVs) can cause significant disease in humans, as was evident in the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002, the Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2012, and the ongoing outbreak in Central China of a yet to be genetically defined CoV (2). Currently, there are no approved therapeutics available, however, Agostini et al. details the effects of a nucleoside analogue that potently inhibits human and zoonotic CoVs in vitro.

In the podcast “Exosomes in your nose and in your gut” in the series “This Week in Microbiology”, hosts Michael Schmidt, Michele Swanson, and Vincent Racaniello talk primarily about two recent articles (Schmidt et al., 2019). The first article focuses on the immune response in nasal epithelial cells to invading pathogens.