Last Chance to Be Koalafied!

My name is Katie Dahlhausen and I am A PhD student in Jonathan’s lab. I am crowd-funding a project to study this fascinating koala biology, as well as investigate alternative infectious disease treatment where antibiotics are not a viable option. Want to help out these adorable critters? You can support the Indiegogo campaign here, which …

Will Microbes Clean our Water?

A recent publication in Environmental Science & Technology and subsequent review on Phys.org gave a lot of promise for the technology of using microbes to clean up waterways. The study suggested that harnessing microbes is an environmentally sustainable solution to breaking down pollutants in water. I think ‘breakthrough’ is a bit strong of an accolade …

The Hysteria about Listeria: Thoughts on Food in the Built Environment

About a month ago, listeria found in Sabra Hummus caused a massive food safety recall across the US. So I got to thinking — how common are pathogens in the food we eat and how is this addressed on industrial scales? Food is processed, transported, and eaten in our built environments multiple times a day, …

Recent Paper Shed’s Light on Effect of Using Antibiotics While Traveling

When I jetted off to South America a year and a half ago, my doctor sent me with a bottle of Ciprofloxacin in case of an unfortunate bout of food poisoning. I thought little of it then, but what does it mean when millions of travelers head to developing countries with antibiotics? You guessed it …

Teixobactin

Teixobactin has been getting a lot of press since it’s debut in the most recent publication of Nature. And rightfully so: The authors claim that the mechanisms by which Teixobactin works will make it very hard for resistance development. Surely this discovery couldn’t have come at a better time, in a period where we have …

Contaminomics

To all of the microbial researchers out there, be careful about contaminants in your cultures, reagents, and equipment! Yes, we all are careful about good techniques and having proper controls. However, this article suggested that perhaps contaminants are surfacing much more in microbial related literature than we thought. This concept isn’t new, and the aforementioned …

50 Shades of Gross

In the 2011 paper “Microbial Biogeography of Public Restroom Surfaces” Noah Fierer and others found that some of the toilet flush handles had similar microbial communities to those of the restroom floor, suggesting evidence of the germaphobic practice of flushing the toilet with a foot. I was curious to know if we could find other microbial …