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Although Michele Banks is not a microbiologist, she found herself speaking to a packed room of microbiologists at the 2016 ASM Microbe meeting in Boston last June. “It all started with the paint,” she says. “I was working with wet-in-wet watercolor, making abstract paintings with a kind of bleedi...

Approximately 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean—on average, under 3,700 m of water. At the seafloor is a blanket of unconsolidated sediment consisting of continental detritus; particulate organic matter; silica- and carbonate-rich, biologically produced hard materials; and void ...

William Schaffner, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, remembers the countless times he and other flu experts mused about the possibilities of a universal vaccine, one that would not need modi...

CURRENT TOPICS

While the limelight shines on the bacterial microbiome for its role in shaping human health and disease, the virome remains more in the shadows. However, viruses associated with human hosts can have profound impacts on their health, according to several researchers who spoke during the ASM 2016 M...

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) apparently was a thermophilic, anaerobic, nitrogen-fixing microorganism, according to William F. Martin from the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf, Germany, and his collaborators. Their findings suppor...

Microbiologists recently realized that lichens, formerly defined as pairings of fungi and algae (cyanobacteria), instead include a third component—yeast. Indeed, yeast cells are found embedded in the cortexes of lichens collected on six continents—thus overturning a definition for lichens that wa...

The development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria depends on a dynamic growth process, involving a program that is far more complex than mere emergence of mutants with higher resistance than their predecessor strains, according to Roy Kishony of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology i...

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, about $936,000 this year, recognizes Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his efforts to understand autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components, research that he began by studying yeast. Separately, among the 201...

ANIMALCULES

ASM NEWS

On October 17, 2016, Merck Research Laboratories (MRL) was officially designated as a Milestones in Microbiology site by ASM for contributions made by its Rahway, N.J., and West Point, Pa., facilities to anti-infectives and vaccines, respectively. This was the first time an industrial site receiv...

Ten young clinical laboratory scientists were recognized for their enthusiasm and commitment to the clinical microbiology profession and given a chance to gain valuable insight into career advancement. The recipients were awarded professional development grants to help facilitate their attendance...

NEW FROM ASM

DEPARTMENTS

Twenty years ago, I took the transformative “Microbial Diversity” course at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass., taught by the late Edward Leadbetter and the late Abigail Salyers. Awed by the depth and breadth of what I soon called “matters microbial,” and perplexed by textboo...

What a happy title! This book could have been called “The Wages of Sin” or something equally judgmental. It deals with the microbial penalties that may accompany such pleasurable activities as ocean cruising, immersing in hot tubs, camping, or having pets. Even taking your kids to the petting zoo...

Issues surrounding transmissions of infectious agents from animals (wild and domestic) to humans have become an increasingly important topic of discussions not only among clinicians and scientists but also in the general public. A search in the PubMed data base (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) using the ke...

Is there any denying that pregnancy is a form of parasitism? After all, the devel-oping organism carries foreign DNA from an outside source, and reroutes nutrients at the host's expense. In cases where “parasite” hatchlings require maternal care, a balance has been struck that minimizes dama...