Microbe Talk

This month, we spoke to Alison Atkin, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Sheffield. As part of her PhD, Alison is looking at ways of using mathematical modelling to help identify and understand mass fatality incidents. We spoke about her work on the Black Death, a pandemic disease that was first seen in Britain in the 14th century.

We also spoke to Lewis Dartnell, a UK Space Agency Research Fellow working at the University of Leicester. Lewis has recently had a paper published in PLOS ONE, which details a potential new way of rapidly identifying bacteria in a hospital environment. We spoke about the work and about how technology developed to help discover life on other planets is being adapted to solve health problems on Earth.

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A few weeks ago, we were kindly invited by the European Society for Virology to go to their congress in Lyon. Ben got to interview several virologists about vaccine development, mosquito control and disease prevention. In addition to this podcast, we filmed some short interviews, which you can find here: http://microb.io/HqKnwm

We've been at the Cheltenham Literature Festival this week, sponsoring three events. I spoke to Dr Thorunn Helgason from the University of York after she spoke at our event 'Bees: From Honey to Hive', alongside BBC TV's Bill Turnbull and Steve Benbow from the London Honey Company.

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This month I spoke to Dr Arwyn Edwards about his research into the microbiome of glaciers and the role that they're playing in climate change. I also took a trip to the University of East Anglia to interview the students taking part in the annual iGEM competition.

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In the second of our podcasts from the SGM Autumn Conference 2013, I interview Robin May, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Birmingham. Robin was speaking at the conference and has recently had a paper published detailing his work on Cryptococcus gattii a rare, pathogenic fungi of healthy people that is quite promiscuous when it comes to passing on its genes.

Here's the first of our interviews recorded during the SGM Autumn Conference. This time round, Professor Ted White from University of Missouri–Kansas City told us some fascinating facts about fungi and explained the current state of drug development to treat fungal diseases.

Scotland Special! This month, we've been up to Glasgow to learn about African animal trypanosomiasis from Dr Jane Munday, who is working to identify new treatments for the disease. We also travelled to Inchcailloch, an island on Loch Lomond, to search for ticks and find out about research into Lyme disease prevalence from Caroline Millins, a PhD student from the University of Glasgow.

It's a bit of a relaunch for us this month on 'Microbe Talk', we hope you like the new format! This month, we've been out and about, travelling to Imperial College London, where Ben interviewed some researchers who are interested in safety mechanisms that can prevent synthetic organisms from escaping or sharing their DNA. We also spoke to Kevin Brown, a historian from St Mary's Hospital, who is an expert on all things Alexander Fleming.

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Using genomic technologies we are learning to combat pathogens and use beneficial microbes as our allies. Jennifer Gardy explains how whole-genome DNA sequencing is being used to reconstruct the spread of killer diseases such as tuberculosis and how this could revolutionize infectious outbreak control. Then, Lisa Buddrus and Mike Bushell talk about generating electricity from bacteria and the future of microbial fuel cells.

Sarah Maddocks discusses the healing properties of manuka honey. She tells us about her work at Cardiff Metropolitan University testing the antimicrobial effect of honey against strains of different bacteria and how honey could be used alongside antibiotic therapy to treat wound infections.