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Convalescent plasma. It’s an old term that’s recently resurfaced as we face a virus with no vaccine. Just this week, a study of 20,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients who received convalescent plasma was published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
While convalescent plasma therapy might be promising for treating COVID-19 patients, it actually has a long history of success with many infectious diseases over the last century. (more…)
Microbes and insects often interact in a delicate symbiosis. The microbes provide nutrients that the insects need and the insects provide a home for the microbes. In the case of the cicada-microbe interactions, the bacteria Hodgkinia provides the essential amino acids histidine and methionine. Over time, the endosymbionts, the microbes living within the host cells, become metabolically integrated with the host, and the endosymbiont genome becomes reduced, leaving few genes outside of the core processes.
But, something strange happened in the cicada Tettigades undada. The three-member symbiosis (cicada and two endosymbiont) became a four-way symbiosis. James Van Leuven and John McCutcheon from the University of Montana found this out in 2014. (more…)
As COVID-19 spreads around the world, more and more things such as conferences, schools, and large events such as SXSW are being canceled - an effort to halt the spread of the virus and reduce the strain on our healthcare system. Meanwhile, dangerous notions circulate: the idea that nearly everyone will get COVID-19 so distancing measures are irrelevant or the idea that we might as well just get it and be done with it.
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In this edition of This Month in Microbiology, we feature the Contamination World Cup, huge phages, coronavirus resources, and bacterial warfare. (more…)
The vineyard becomes the lab in investigations of Botrytis cinerea. It’s a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type of fungus because it causes two very different types of infections. It produces sweet wine grapes during noble rot but causes the plant’s demise in grey mold.
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