As the world watches the Olympics, the journal Nature Microbiology hosted the Microbial Olympics. Here are some highlights from this year’s Microbial Olympics events: (1) Synchronized swarming: Swarming is a coordinated movement of bacterial populations to spread out over solid or semi-solid surfaces. Swarming speeds are comparable to swimming speeds in the same organism. In…
“Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth’s crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry…
“You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway.” – Zack Love When I first moved to Boston…
“We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species… Together, they are referred to as our microbiome — and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.” ― Michael Specter A couple weeks ago, I attended the Boston…
“When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we’d have the resistance problem we face today. We didn’t give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.” -Bonnie Bassler Antibiotic resistant superbugs have dominated health-related news recently, warning of an impending post-antibiotic apocalypse where current antibiotics are no longer effective. Though…