Microbe Talk

In this month's podcast: Ebola vaccines for chimpanzees and engineering the built environment to prevent the spread of infections.

First up, Anand visited the labs of the Healthy Infrastructure Research Group at UCL. Dr Lena Ciric and her team told us about the spread of tuberculosis in offices, toxic black mould and light-activated antimicrobial surfaces. Lena also showed us around the group's walk-in environmental chamber, which they use for safely releasing pathogenic microbes.

And we hear from Dr Peter Walsh of the University of Cambridge, who is currently leading efforts to vaccinate chimps and gorillas against Ebola. As many as a third of the planet's wild populations may have been wiped out by the virus, which affects great apes in a similar way to humans. Peter told us more about his work, and the first ever trial to develop an oral vaccine for chimpanzees.

Image credit: Indo_girl2010 on Flickr under CC BY 2.0

Where do antibiotics end up after we've used them? The answer is almost everywhere – in our soils and crops, in our rivers and in our drinking water.

Is this something we should be concerned about? And is it driving the evolution of resistance?

In this Microbe Talk Extra, we spoke to Dr Will Gaze from the University of Exeter Medical School about antimicrobial resistance in the environment, and his lab's research on water treatment plants, coastal waters, and surfers' bums.

Could the mud and soil a person walks through be used to identify where they've been? In part two of our forensic microbiology special, we look at the ways that soil from crime scenes can help pinpoint the whereabouts of people and objects in police investigations.

We spoke to Professor Lorna Dawson from the James Hutton Institute about her work on criminal cases, and how microbiology is being used to enhance the field of soil forensics.

Image credit: Alan Cleaver on Flickr under CC BY 2.0

Music:

'Submerging Blue-Black' by Podington Bear, under CC BY-NC 3.0

'I Am Running Down the Long Hallway of Viewmont Elementary' by Chris Zabriskie, under CC BY 4.0

'Trio for Piano Violin and Viola' by Kevin MacLeod, under CC BY 3.0

'Lips' by Plurabelle under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

 

Sound Effects: From freesound.org.

'Walking1_gravel' by tec studios, under CC0 1.0

'CarStartAndDriveOff' by jmdh, under CC0 1.0

'BikeBellWhileRiding' byqubodup, under CC BY 3.0

'Woodland Birdsong June' by justkiddink, under CC BY 3.0

 

For this Microbe Talk Extra, we went to the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition to meet the Flu Fighters – scientists working on new ways to fight and diagnose influenza.

Dr Holly Shelton works at The Pirbright Institute on the genetics of the flu virus. She talked to us about how different strains of flu infect different species, from bats to birds to humans.

We also hear about new devices which allow farmers to test their poultry for bird flu – and get instant results.

No animals were harmed in the making of this episode, but a robot chicken was rather disgruntled.

This month’s episode of Microbe Talk is something a bit different – the first in a two-part special on forensic microbiology.

In part one, we’re exploring the microbes of death and decay – and how they can be used by forensic scientists to work out when and how someone has died.

We spoke to writer Mo Costandi about his recent experiences visiting body farms in Texas, where scientists study the process of decomposition. Mo wrote an article for the Wellcome Trust’s Mosaic on the subject (which is well worth reading), so we asked him to the Society’s offices to find out more about what happens to our bodies after we die.

We also hear from forensic scientist Dr Gulnaz Javan, who is conducting research into the “thanatomicrobiome”, or microbes of death, at one of these facilities. Gulnaz and her team take samples from cadavers and the surrounding soil in order to study the microbial communities present at different stages of decomposition. She talked to us about a recent paper from her group that discusses their early findings.

This episode contains descriptions of decomposing human corpses.

Image credit: Mo Costandi

Music: Chris Zabriskie under CC BY 4.0

Sound effects: “BunchOfFlies” by HerbertBoland under CC BY 3.0, “Countryside in Texas, insects and birds” by felix.blume under CC0 1.0

Private Ernest Cable was a WW1 soldier who died on 13 March 1915 and his body now lies in a communal cemetery in Wimereux, France.

Records suggest that Cable was the first British soldier in WW1 to die from dysentery - an intestinal diarrhoeal infection, caused by Shigella flexneri bacteria. Today, a sample of the very Shigella which infected and killed Cable can be found at the National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC), where it is helping researchers to understand the evolution of drug resistance.

The NCTC is part of Public Health England's Culture Collections, which includes thousands of strains of bacteria, viruses and fungi. We spoke to Julie Russell, Head of Culture Collections, about some of the more unusual historical strains housed there, and the role that they continue to play in the fight against disease.

 

Image: Wimereux Communal Cemetery

Image credit: Wernervc on Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY-SA-3.0

We’ve been out and about this month, interviewing researchers in Glasgow, Manchester and Galway for the podcast. Up first, Ben travelled to Scotland to chat with Dr Adam Kucharski from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Adam is an expert in disease modelling, and he told us how his work is helping in the fight against the ongoing Ebola outbreak.

Books and films are full of end-of-the-world microbiological fiction, but can they be used to help engage the public with the fundamentals of disease research? Anand went to Manchester to speak with Professor Jo Verran, founder of the Bad Bugs Book Club.

A few weeks ago, Ben attended the Society’s Irish Division Meeting in Galway. There were lots of great talks, and he got a chance to grab a few minutes with Professors Kim Lewis and Martin Cormican. Kim is Director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University, Boston, USA, while Martin is Professor of Bacteriology and a Consultant Microbiologist at NUI Galway. Both are interested in antibiotic resistance, but are coming at it from different angles…

Image credit: Phalinn Ooi under CC BY 2.0

Last month, the Society held its Annual Conference, which was held in Birmingham this year. It was a great event: over a thousand delegates attended, presenting hundreds of talks and posters. We spoke to some of the attendees about their work for this month’s podcast.

Firstly, we chatted with Dr Jennifer Gardy from the BC Centre for Disease Control in Canada, who told us about her role in the Society’s new journal Microbial Genomics and about the field of genomics in general.

Next up was Professor David Minnikin from the University of Birmingham, who is researching the origins of tuberculosis, which appears to have begun as an infection of ancient animals in the Pleistocene era.

Dr Nick Loman, also from the University of Birmingham, who told us about his work using a seriously tiny DNA sequencing machine.

Finally, Karl Dunne from, you guessed it, the University of Birmingham, talked about his PhD research, which has seen him sequence the first sample of E. coli bacteria, isolated by Theodor Escherich.

Image credit: Bob Hall on Flickr under CC BY-SA 2.0

In 1677, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had a letter published in the Royal Society's journal 'Philosophical Transactions', which was the first paper to describe microbes, opening up the world of microbiology we know today. This year is the 350th anniversary of 'Philosophical Transactions', so the Royal Society commissioned a special issue containing commentaries about some of the most important papers to appear in the journal. I spoke to Dr Nick Lane, from University College London, who’s written about Leeuwenhoek’s letter and its importance.

Speaking of Royal Society journals, I also spoke to Dr Paul Parham from the University of Liverpool in this podcast. Paul has recently co-edited a themed edition of the ‘Philosophical Transactions B’, which concentrates on the effect that climate change is having on vector-borne diseases, such as those transmitted by mosquitoes or ticks. I asked Paul about how changes in climate are altering the behaviour and habit of these vectors, and what this might mean for diseases.

Image credit: Wellcome Images (cropped) under CC BY 4.0

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find out that every bacterium and every archeon on the planet had suddenly vanished. What would happen? Could humanity survive? This month, Ben spoke to Dr Jack Gilbert and Dr Josh Neufeld, who have published a thought experiment in PLOS Biology that wonders exactly that...

Image credit: Thinkstock