Ilaria Capua talks about running an internationally renowned animal influenza lab, and her time spent in the Italian Parliament. Accused of virus trafficking as part of a national scandal, she has since cleared her name and speaks here about the importance of scientific credibility and reputation.
Most bacteria live a sedentary lifestyle in community structures called biofilms. Vaughn Cooper tells us what bacterial biofilms are, why biofilms differ from test tube environments, and how long-term evolution experiments combined with population genomics are teaching us how bacteria really work. He also discusses using hands-on bacterial evolution activities to introduce high schoolers to future STEM possibilities. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You...
Marylynn Yates discusses how the urban water cycle and its importance in eliminating waterborne pathogens. She describes the types of microbes that can survive in water and how testing for different microbial types can affect interpretation of contamination levels. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with the ASM Podcast app . Julie's biggest takeaways: Worldwide, water is a large source of infectious disease. Bill...
Colleen Kraft talks about treating Americans who became sick with Ebola during the west African outbreak and were evacuated to her hospital for treatment. In the second half, Kraft talks about her experience performing fecal transfers, and explains why she sees the gut microflora like a garden. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with the ASM Podcast app . Julie's biggest takeaways: The patient conditions couldn’t ...
Sabra Klein addresses the question: how does biological sex influence influenza infection and vaccination? She explains her findings on inflammation differences between males and females, and how these differences can affect the outcome of disease. Klein also discusses her advocacy for inclusion of biological sex in method reporting as a means to improve scientific rigor. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with th...
Jennifer Martiny describes the incredible microbial biodiversity of natural ecosystems such as soils and waterways. She explains how to add a bit of control in experiments with so many variables, and why categorizing microbial types is important for quantifying patterns. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with the ASM Podcast app . Julie's biggest takeaways: Studying microbial community functions in their natural ...
Peter Hotez talks about neglected tropical diseases: what are they, where are they found, and where did the term “neglected tropical disease” come from, anyway? Hotez discusses some of the strategies his and other groups are using for vaccine development, and his work as an advocate for childhood vaccines and global health. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with the ASM Podcast app . Julie's biggest takeaways: Re...
Stacey Schultz-Cherry explains the selection process to choose the influenza virus strains to include in the annual influenza vaccine. Schultz-Cherry also discusses her research on the influence of obesity on the course of disease and vaccine efficacy. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or by email . You can also listen on your mobile device with the ASM Podcast app . Julie's biggest takeaways: The WHO Collaborating Centers and National Influenza Centers around the wor...
Gigi Kwik Gronvall talks to MTM about the importance of biopreparedness. Gronvall discusses her work in creating policies around potential natural, accidental, and man-made pandemics. She describes her experiences running pandemic thought exercises that help researchers, public health workers, and governmental officials apply preparedness ideas to real-world simulations. Host: Julie Wolf Julie's biggest takeaways: Thought exercises and scenarios work well for people to understand how technology,...
Jack Gilbert talks about his studies on microbiomes of all sorts. He describes the origin of the Earth Microbiome Project, which has ambitions to characterize all microbial life on the planet, and talks more specifically about the built microbiome of manmade ecosystems such as hospitals. Gilbert explains how advances in scientific techniques have driven past microbiome-related discoveries and will continue to do so in the future. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone , Android , RSS , or b...
Tara C. Smith discusses her work uncovering ties between agriculture and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Her studies have found MRSA on and around pig farms, on animal handlers, and even in packaged meat in the grocery store. She also talks about using zombies as an allegory for infectious disease outbreak preparedness. Links for this episode Tara C. Smith website Aetiology Blog on Science Blogs Network Outbreak News Interview with Smith on her work communicating the science ...
Raymond St. Leger describes his work on insect pathogenic fungi. Members of this diverse group of fungi can be found as part of the plant rhizosphere, where they provide nutrients to the plant, and can also be deployed as insect control agents. Raymond discusses his work with communities in Burkina Faso, where he works with officials to educate and gain consent for use of mosquito-killing fungi to control the spread of malaria. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone, Android, RSS, or by ema...
Vincent Racaniello discusses how he ended up studying polio virus and the three eureka moments he’s experienced so far: uncovering the polio genome, discovering the polio receptor, and generating a mouse model of polio disease. Vincent discusses his interest in science communications, including his blog and active podcast network. Host: Julie Wolf Activities of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in the Field of Virus Research (free) on iPhone, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also...
Welcome back, Meet the Scientist subscribers! For those of you who never heard an episode of Meet the Scientist, thanks for taking a listen. We're excited to tell all of you we're now Meet the Microbiologist (MTM). MTM is the same great, one-on-one conversations captured in Meet the Scientist just with a new name and a new host. Julie Wolf of the American Society for Microbiology will be bringing back the podcast with all new episodes with scientists who work in one of the many areas of the micr...
In this podcast, I speak to Martin Blaser, Frederick H. King Professor of Internal Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine and Professor of Microbiology at the New York School of Medicine. Blaser studies Helicobacter pylori, bacteria that live in the stomachs of billions of people. Blaser has shown that H. pylori has a strange double life inside of us. On the one hand, it can cause ulcers and gastric cancer. On the other hand, it can protect us from diseases of the esophagus, allergi...
All life hums with electricity, from our heartbeats to the electrons that flow to the oxygen we breathe.But some bacteria are electricians par excellence, generating electric currents in the soil and water. In this podcast, I talk to microbe-electricity expert Jeff Gralnick of the University of Minnesota about the biology behind these currents, and how engineers may be able to harness it to power technology.
In this podcast I talk to Jessica Green of the University of Oregon about aerobiology: the science of life in the air. We live in an invisible ocean of life, with millions of microbes swarming around us. Microbes can live many miles high in the upper atmosphere, and they may actually be able to feed and grow in clouds. Green and I talk not just about high-altitude aerobiology, but about the microbes we share our homes and offices with, and how better understanding them can help our health....
In this podcast, I talk to Charles Bamforth of the University of California, Davis, about the surprisingly complex chemistry of beer, and the pivotal role microbes play in making it happen.
In this podcast I talk to Thomas Scott of the University of California, Davis, about dengue fever, a disease that's on the rise. Spread by mosquitoes, it can make you feel as if your bones are broken and leave you exhausted for months. In more serious cases, people suffer uncontrollable bleeding and sometimes die. Dengue is expanding its range, and is even making incursions into the United States. Scott and I talk about what scientists know and don't know yet about dengue, and what the best stra...
In this podcast I talk to Charles Ofria , a computer scientist at Michigan State University. Ofria and his colleagues have created a program called Avida in which digital organisms can multiply and evolve. They are studying many of evolution's deepest questions, such as how complexity evolves from simplicity and why individuals make sacrifices for each other. The evolution unfolding in Avida is also yielded new software that can run robots and sensors in the real world. Bonus Content includes: A...
In this podcast I spoke to David Baker , a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington. Baker and his colleagues study how proteins fold, taking on the complex shapes that make our lives possible. It turns out that protein folding is a fiendishly hard problem to solve, and even the most sophisticated computers do a poor job of solving it. So Baker and his colleagues have enlisted tens of thousands of people to play a protein-folding game called Foldit . I talked to David Baker abou...
It never occurred to me that the human body and a coral reef have a lot in common--until I spoke to Forest Rohwer for this podcast. Rohwer is a microbiologist at San Diego State University, and he studies how microbes make coral reefs both healthy and sick. Just as we are home to a vast number of microbes, coral reefs depend on their own invisible menagerie of algae and bacteria to get food, recycle waste, and fend off invaders. But as Rohwer writes in his new book, Coral Reefs in the Microbial ...
In this podcast, I talk to Susan Golden , the co-director of the Center for Chronobiology at the University of California at San Diego. We talked about Golden's research into time--in particular, how living things know what time it is. While you may have heard of our own "body clock" that tracks the 24-hour cycle of the day, it turns out that some bacteria can tell time, too. Golden has discovered how evolution has produced a molecular clock inside microbes far more elegant than any manmade time...
How many genes can a species lose and still stay alive? It turns out, bacteria can lose just about all of them! In this podcast, I talk to Nancy Moran of Yale University about her fascinating work on the microbes that live inside insects such as aphids and cicadas. After millions of years, they have become stripped down creatures that are revealing some profound lessons about how superfluous most genes are--at least if you live inside a host. Recent Publications: Bacterial genes in the aphid gen...
In this podcast I talk to Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington about the mathematics of microbes. Bergstrom is a mathematical biologist who probes the abstract nature of life itself. We talk about how life uses information, and how information can evolve. But in Bergstrom's hands, these abstractions shed light on very real concerns in medicine, from the way that viruses jam our immune system's communication systems to to the best ways to fight antibiotic resistance. Publications: Mappi...
In this podcast I talk to Bonnie Bassler , a professor at Princeton and the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology. Bassler studies the conversations that bacteria have, using chemicals instead of words, Her research is not only helping to reveal how bacteria work together to make us sick, but also how we might interrupt their dialogue in order to cure infections. Related Projects: Measurement of the copy number of the master quorum-sensing regulator of a bacterial cell. Inform...
In this podcast, I talk to Mitchell Sogin , the Director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood's Hole, Massachusetts. Dr. Sogin is one of the leaders of an ambitious project to survey the microbes of the ocean--which total over 36,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cells. Using the latest DNA-sequencing technology, Dr. Sogin and his colleagues are cataloging microbes from all over the world, and are disco...
In this podcast I talk to James Liao , a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. I spoke to Dr. Liao about his research into engineering microbes to make fuel. Today, we get most of the fuel for our cars out of the ground. It's a process fraught with dangerous consequences, from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the rise in global temperatures thanks to greenhouse gases. Dr. Liao is among a growing number of scientists who think that microbes can help u...
To mark the celebration of Microbeworld's 50th episode of the Meet the Scientist podcast, we created a time lapse video that shows exactly what it takes to produce a single episode of the show.We hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look and we thank you for listening week after week. Cheers, to another 50 episodes!
In this podcast, I talk to R. Ford Denison of the University of Minnesota. Denison is an evolutionary biologist who's interested in how to make agriculture better. The ways in which plants thrive or fail are shaped by their evolutionary history, as well as the evolution that unfolds every planting season. We're most familiar with the evolution of resistance to pesticides in insects and to herbicides in weeds. But evolution has many other effects on farms. For example, many important crop plants,...
