Antimicrobial resistance has spread to London this month. The source of the outbreak? The Science Museum: its new exhibition, Superbugs, explores this monumental issue and our responses to it. Read more
Graphic artist Erik Nelson Rodriguez is an innovative comics journalist. With reporter Darryl Holliday, he began creating nonfiction stories in graphic-novel form at university, covering issues such as gun violence. In 2016, US National Public Radio (NPR) invited Rodriguez to collaborate on an account of Syrian refugee Nedal Said: a trained microbiologist and teacher, Said fled the war in 2013 and is now a researcher in Leipzig. The result, The Scientist Who Escaped Aleppo, is part of NPR’s special series on refugee scientists: a testament to the ordeals endured, and the extraordinary potential offered, by the refugee community. Read more
Continuing with our month-long celebration of Nature Genetics 25th anniversary, I have chosen to highlight a study by Sarah Fortune and colleagues estimating mutation rate differences between different lineages of Mycobacterium tuberculosis published in June 2013. Read more
A new study published online this week in Nature Genetics reports the discovery of novel host targets of HIV infection identified from a high-throughput CRISPR/Cas9-based screen. This screen was performed in CD4 + T-cells and was designed to find candidate genes required for successful HIV infection, but whose inactivation did not affect cell viability. In this way, potential drug targets for anti-HIV therapy could be discovered. Read more
Antibiotics emerged as miracle drugs and “silver bullets” in the early 20th century, revolutionizing medicine and our ability to combat infectious disease while positively impacting health and lifespans on a large scale. This remarkable triumph held steady for many years, and consequently antibiotic research and development diminished as a priority due to the seeming defeat of bacterial infections. However, the selective pressure that came with antibiotic exposure led to the development of bacterial resistance to these compounds, motivating renewed interest in what is now an extremely important public health issue. Mechanisms of resistance are many and ever-evolving, and we know now that it is not a matter of IF bacteria will become resistant to a class of antibiotics, but when. The search for new and potentially exploitable bacterial vulnerabilities, then, becomes a constant enterprise in order for us to keep pace with the bacteria in the antibiotics/resistance arms race. Read more
Red blood cell production in the bone marrow is a precarious process. Too few RBCs and you can become anemic; too many and you could be suffering from polycythemia vera, a rare, so-called ‘myeloproliferative’ genetic disorder marked by an abnormally high RBC count. Now, researchers have identified a surprising player in the regulation of RBC production under these disease conditions. Reporting online today in Nature Medicine, two independent teams describe the pivotal role of macrophages—amoeba-like white blood cells responsible for digesting harmful foreign microbes and removing old or dying cells—for generating RBCs in both anemic and over-proliferative conditions. Read more
Commonly used cancer drugs could be repurposed to help eliminate tapeworm infections, according to the first full genome analysis of the human gut pathogen. Read more
University of Liverpool, UK … Read more
University of Geneva Medical School, Switzerland … Read more
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada … Read more