As 2018 reaches its last hours, we reflect on the past year and set goals for the upcoming year. At The Microbial Menagerie, the last year showcased a menagerie of microbes in all sorts of environments: within zombie worms in the depth of the ocean, within sourdough starters all over the world, and within sap-feeding insects. (more…)
Year: 2018
Secret Serratia: Then and Now
If you’re a microbiologist, the acronym HGT may have you thinking about horizontal gene transfer, the transfer of genes between microbes. But during the months of November and December, HGT takes on a different meaning: holiday gift transfer. As part of the annual #SecretSerratia holiday gift exchange, pairs of microbiologists exchange gifts, usually science and microbiology related.
I eagerly signed up to participate and my Secret Serratia and I swapped gifts and shared photos of our microbial gifts on Twitter, along with ~70 other microbiologists. (more…)
Move over flu season, there’s an entire epidemic calendar
Flu season is upon us, but there are actually “seasons” for many other infectious diseases. Chickenpox outbreaks peak each spring and polio transmission historically occurred in the summer. In fact, at least 69 infectious diseases vary seasonally.
Micaela Elvira Martinez, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University, found this out by systematically querying the data of 69 infectious diseases for seasonality. She chose the diseases to study based on those that were of public health interest (including neglected tropical diseases). She searched the literature for a disease name + season and/or disease name + season + human and collected information from the publications found. When needed, she searched for disease name + “seasonality.”
What she found was that seasons matter – but it’s more complicated than cold weather keeping everyone cooped up indoors. Martinez categorizes the impact of seasonality into four factors: environmental, host behavior, life cycle events, and exogenous biotic factors. What’s more, all of these factors can influence disease epidemiology at many levels: from hosts, to reservoirs, and to vectors. (more…)
The double-edged sword called oxygen
By Ananya Sen
If you were to enter a time machine and go back to about 3.8 billion years ago, what would you find? Volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane into the atmosphere, some water, and no oxygen, which means that you would be dead in about six minutes. So how did humans, who are completely dependent on oxygen, come to exist? (more…)
Are we more bacteria than human? That depends when you last pooped
For decades, the notion that bacteria living on our bodies outnumbered human cells 10 to 1 was popular among microbiologists and the public. Turns out, this estimation is wrong.
In 2016, Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo from the Weizmann Institute examined the origins of this estimation and found that the ratio is actually closer to 1:1. (more…)