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…
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…
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 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…
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…