position:microbiologist

Montreal disease experts tracking tropical infection in the Arctic | Montreal Gazette
▻http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-disease-experts-tracking-tropical-infection-in-the-arctic

A few years ago, several children in a remote northern Quebec community got very sick with intense diarrhea. Turns out they were infected with a dangerous bug more common in the tropics — but they caught the infection in the Canadian Arctic.

The outbreak hit at least 10 villages in Nunavik, affecting mostly children. The culprit was a microscopic intestinal parasite called Cryptosporidium. It was discovered for the first time in Nunavik, Quebec, by a Montreal team of infectious diseases experts at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre in 2013.

Finding a tropical strain of Cryptosporidium in the Arctic where this disease was not previously known was a big surprise, said microbiologist Cédric Yansouni, the study’s senior author and McGill University professor in the division of infectious diseases in the medical microbiology department. The parasite is more common in developing countries in Africa and South America than in Canada.
[…]
Researchers documented 69 cases between 2013 and 2014, mostly in children under age five. But the disease is likely under-reported because most people do not bother to get tested unless they are extremely sick, he said. There is no access to local testing and samples have to be sent nearly 2,000 kilometres south to Montreal.

It’s not clear how such a tropical disease wended its way to remote communities in the Arctic or what caused the outbreak. Crypto lives in the intestines of mammals, including humans, and is usually spread by eating contaminated food, drinking water contaminated by feces, or through contact with infected individuals. Researchers tested the drinking water in the village where the outbreak began but found no contamination there. “We may never know how it got up there,” Yansouni said.

“It’s unlikely that initial infection was acquired from animals or contaminated waterways in the region,” Yansouni said. But the good news is that the outbreak prompted efforts to speed diagnosis locally without having to ship samples to Montreal, he added.

This Astrobiologist Is Collecting Unrecognizable Beings from the Stratosphere - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/this-astrobiologist-is-collecting-unrecognizable-beings-from-the-stratosphere

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Milton Wainwright believes he’s seen ET. In Earth’s upper atmosphere, he claims to have found evidence for panspermia—the hypothesis that life travels through the cosmos via meteoroids and other objects. A microbiologist and astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield, Wainwright sends large balloons up to the stratosphere, as high as 25 miles above the planet’s surface, to look for microorganisms drifting in from space. “Nearly every time we go to the stratosphere, we find these unusual organisms,” he says. “They’re not coming up from Earth.” If they were, he argues, his samples would contain earthly particles or look like earthly beings—which, he says, they don’t. But he’s had a hard time overcoming his critics’ skepticism that the samples differ enough from Earth-bound life to count as (...)

How Burgers and Fries Are Killing Your Microbial Balance
►http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

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So a remarkable and somewhat quixotic effort has begun to catalog and possibly preserve, before they disappear, the #microbes of people who live in environments thought to resemble humanity’s past—people whose #microbiomes may approximate an ancestral state. Researchers are motoring down rivers in the Amazon, off-roading in the East African savanna, hiking into the mountain villages of Papua New Guinea. They see themselves as rushing to catalog an ecosystem that may soon disappear.

“It’s really our last chance to harvest a lot of these microbes from around the world,” Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “We have to do it before it’s too late—and it’s very nearly too late.”

He and others suspect these populations won’t retain their traditional ways much longer. Antibiotics, thought to deplete microbes, are already used frequently in some communities. And as modernization and acculturation progresses—as these peoples move toward the sanitized, indoor-dwelling, junk food-eating reality that characterizes much life in developed nations today—some human microbes, or perhaps certain configurations of those microbes, may be lost forever.

For now, scientists are careful to characterize the quest as purely descriptive; they want to know how these human microbiomes affect our bodies. Yet a kind of microbial ark—a storage vault for potentially endangered human microbes—is perhaps implied. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University and Dominguez-Bello’s husband, argues that because Westernized peoples may have lost important microbes, we may have to repopulate ourselves with microbes derived from more traditional-living populations—from, say, Amazonian Amerindians or African hunter-gatherers.

#microbiote #alimentation

How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution - Issue 30: Identity
►http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

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For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber. Scientists (...)

Here’s How to Make Climate Change Extra Scary - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/heres-how-to-make-climate-change-extra-scary

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Thirty thousand years ago, a woolly mammoth in Siberia shed a giant virus. It soon became encased in ice and, for tens of thousands of years, the virus slept. As global temperatures warm and the permafrost begins to melt, the virus stirs. It is sucked into the nostril of a researcher where it injects its DNA into a cell. The DNA commandeers the cell’s proteins and generates new viruses, turning the researcher into a walking pathogen factory. As she interacts with people, the virus swarms around the world, infecting millions and causing devastation on a massive scale.Alex Tihonov/Getty Images Such a scenario isn’t yet a reality, but it may be closer than you think. Jean-Michel Claverie, a microbiologist at Aix-Marseilles University in Provence, could have caused this scenario twice. In (...)

In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun - Issue 25: Water
▻http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/in-search-of-lifes-smoking-gun

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It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control room, radiated energy despite the hour. He peered intently through his glasses at dozens of monitors, occasionally running a hand over his shaved head. On the live video feed from the remotely operated submersible on the bottom, we watched thick black smoke with a scorching temperature of over 350 degrees Celsius billow from a rocky tower a mile beneath us. It was a stunning sight, an underwater pillar releasing a storm of pent-up energy from the dark bowels of the Earth. Vetriani, a trim (...)

In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun - Issue 25: Water
▻http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/in-search-of-lifes-smoking-gun-rp

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It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control room, radiated energy despite the hour. He peered intently through his glasses at dozens of monitors, occasionally running a hand over his shaved head. On the live video feed from the remotely operated submersible on the bottom, we watched thick black smoke with a scorching temperature of over 350 degrees Celsius billow from a rocky tower a mile beneath us. It was a stunning sight, an underwater pillar releasing a storm of pent-up energy from the dark bowels of the Earth. Vetriani, a trim (...)

Anglo Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA
▻http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27263-anglo-saxon-remedy-kills-hospital-superbug-mrsa.html

The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald’s Leechbook, housed in the British Library. (...)

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After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. “It was self-sterilising,” says Harrison. “That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use.”

#ail #santé #résistance_aux_antibiotiques #staphiloccoque_doré

In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun - Issue 17: Big Bangs
▻http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/in-search-of-lifes-smoking-gun

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It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field in the eastern Pacific. Rutgers microbiologist Costantino Vetriani, seated a few feet away from me in the dark control room, radiated energy despite the hour. He peered intently through his glasses at dozens of monitors, occasionally running a hand over his shaved head. On the live video feed from the remotely operated submersible on the bottom, we watched thick black smoke with a scorching temperature of over 350 degrees Celsius billow from a rocky tower a mile beneath us. It was a stunning sight, an underwater pillar releasing a storm of pent-up energy from the dark bowels of the Earth. Vetriani, a trim (...)

Say Hello to the 100 Trillion Bacteria That Make Up Your Microbiome - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html

These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

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Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” This humbling new way of thinking about the self has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be inextricably linked.