I Got To Work With Some HeLa Cells Today!

A tardigrade.-

Physarum pulcherrimum + beetle

by Kim Fleming

It's not the best "microbiology" art, but it has a very interesting background. Two bacteria from two different clinical cases were inoculated on the TSCB medium. This metallic blue spilling bacterium is of course Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The yellow one (positive reaction on TSCB medium) is Vibrio metschnikovii isolated from chronic UTI in a dog. It was an unusual microbiological diagnosis. But what can you do when even your dog has a better holiday than you? Problems with urination (in this dog) began just after returning from the Mediterranean, the owners and the dog intensively used the charms of warm and salty water.

Bad Newts: Amphibians are in Serious Trouble

My colleagues and I have just had a paper published in Nature, based on our efforts to assess almost all amphibian species for the IUCN Red Lists. The major takeaway messages:

It is a bad time to be an amphibian

Two fifths of all amphibians are threatened with extinction.

Salamanders are the most threatened group; three fifths of all salamanders are threatened with extinction!

Climate change is a major driver of amphibian declines globally

Habitat loss, especially due to agriculture, is a problem for the vast majority of amphibians

Chytrid pandemics have caused and continue to cause catastrophic declines of both salamanders and frogs

Protected areas and careful management are working as strategies! They are actively improving the outlook of some species

As many as 222 amphibian species may have gone extinct in recent times; of those, 185 are suspected extinct but not yet confirmed.

Our paper is Open Access, you can read it here!

Photo of Atelopus hoogmoedi by Jaime Culebras, used with permission

Me: here's a fun bacteria fact!

My mom: wow! Horrifying! Please never tell me anything like that ever again!

What advice would you give to someone who is going into microbiology ? Love your blog 😺

thank you! 🫶🏻

for someone going into microbiology, i’d definitely recommend putting effort into your chemistry courses, especially if they’re not your strong suit (i’m not very good at chemistry)

also, take any lab experiences that you can get, even if they’re not micro! any time that you can get into the lab and get your hands dirty (metaphorically speaking) will help you develop your skills!

Call me mRNA because AUG AGA GGG UUU UUC AUG GUG GGA UGA

by Journey to the Microcosmos on yt

How a novel class of sulfonamides potently blocks malaria transmission

Drugs to treat malaria symptoms and insecticides to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes have improved in recent decades, but the parasite and the mosquitoes are evolving to become resistant to these strategies.

The Baum laboratory along with colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, previously identified a new class of potent antimalarial compounds, belonging to a family of sulfonamides. These compounds kill the parasite only when it is in a specific sexual phase of its life cycle, rapidly stopping it from being able to infect a mosquito and, therefore, preventing any subsequent human infection.

In their new Disease Models & Mechanisms article, Baum and colleagues explored exactly how these compounds work, which is an essential step before the compounds can be developed for testing in patients.

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