I know it looks like I’ve been slacking off lately. And from the perspective of the blogosphere, I suppose that might be accurate. But it’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with the NSF engineering conference and President Aoun’s keynote address. I did have one wonderful conversation yesterday afternoon with microbiologist Slava Epstein. My ...
In the last fifty years, pharmaceutical companies have spent tens of billions of dollars trying to find new classes of antibiotic drugs. Only one has made it into clinical practice. Seem surprising to you? Yeah, me too. At the same time, antibacterial resistance has been rising, meaning the pathogens that infect us are getting better ...
There are approximately 5 nonillion bacteria on earth (where a million has six zeros after the one, a nonillion has 30 zeroes). The microorganisms that live in the environment and in animal “microbiomes” (the collection of all the bacteria that call an animal home) represent the most diverse group of species around. They can be ...
Anthony D’Onofrio studies dirt…or the bacteria that grow on dirt, to be more specific. He is a post-doctoral researcher in the Antimicrobial Discovery Center led by Professor Kim Lewis in the biology department and has started a non-profit educational organization, along with Professor Lewis, called Sample America to help him with a somewhat impossible task: ...
What you see to the left may look like a giant dehydryated cocroach overgrown with some form of alien kudzoo, but in fact it’s a microbe only a few microns long. That’s a fraction of the thickness of a human hair. Slava Epstein of the the department of biology found this little guy in the ...