Microbes versus Orange; part two

Earlier this year ago I set up a timelapse looking at an orange in a jar, and just let it mould up. Then I made a vloggy video of it and put it on YouTube!

Now, way later than originally intended, I've finished to followup video so you can actually see what happens. Hooray!

Happy Heat; Making it through the 'Danger Zone'

I like the cold. Anything over twenty degrees is a bit too hot for me, and the extra heat from being in full sunlight drives me to skulk from one patch of shade to the next like I'm on a stealth mission 24/7. Other people relish the heat, actively seeking it out.

Everyone has their optimum temperature, and bacteria are no different! From Psychrophiles growing in the fridge, to Thermophiles living in volcanic vents under the sea, different bacteria tolerate different temperature ranges. So what does that mean for us?

Step Into The Science Kitchen

I like analogies. They're great. I use the excuse that they make things easier to relate to and understand, but really it's because I find coming up with them really fun!

I love Community so much

My go-to analogy for the laboratory is that it's like a kitchen where you can't eat anything without getting horribly ill (like my parents' kitchen when mum's making cakes for people, #coeliaclife). I wanted to explore that today, with pictures from a real lab (my one) to help! Also because I don't have much time for the blog today and pictures each contribute 1000 words to the overall word count, or something like that.

2017; Withdrawal, Freedom, and a Bottle of Lilt

Happy New Year! Plus about a week, I've been ill and busy (starting 2017 the way most of 2016 went, then!). I hope you had a lovely winter break, Christmas, New Year, all the lovely times associated with trying to pretend it's not miserable outside.
What are your resolutions, aims or goals for 2017? I have one big one; one that I've been setting my sights on for years. One that I am determined to achieve, and that I'm going to be so proud when I have done so.

This year, I am going to drink a bottle of Lilt.

This isn't a sponsored post, I just love and miss Lilt

Bacteria; How do we Kill Them?

I like focusing on the friendly, useful bacteria, but there are some pretty mean nasty ones out there that cause horrible diseases, wipe out crops, contaminate my experiments, and generally ruin everyone's day. That's where exciting things like antibiotics, sterilising procedures and autoclaves come in; they are our weapons, killing these unwanted bacteria. But how do they work? How do we actually kill bacteria?

World Mental Health Day; My Mental Health Tips

Today (the tenth of October) is World Mental Health day! Mental Health is a really important issue for me personally, but also for everyone; while nobody really talks about it 9not nearly enough, at least) it impacts on a huge percentage of the population, and is the biggest cause of death in my age group in the UK. It is likely to affect you, or someone you know, either right now or in the future, so I thought today I'd share some of my tips for lookjing after your mental health. I found these out the hard way so hopefully sharing them will stop somebody else having to!

Xenobiology; Microbial life on other planets!

When we think of aliens we think of invaders from other worlds, Sigourney Weaver being badass and Arnold Schwarzenegger directing people towards waiting air transport (while also being badass). But, at least in our own solar system, it's most likely that any life we find out there will be microbial. This makes sense; they're much better at living in conditions different to the normal Earth ones! We may have warm jumpers and air conditioning, but there aren't many people who are happy to reproduce in acid lakes or at the bottom of the ocean in hydrothermal vents. Microbes 1, Humans 0.

So are we going to all get crazy space diseases if they come to Earth, much like the end of War of the Worlds when the aliens all get flu?

I'm not an expert in this, I just think it's a cool topic so wanted to write a post on it! There's a lot more to say so it might return in the future, like alien herpes.

Lions! Tigers! Bacillus thuringiensis...? Where are the snappy bacteria names?

In line with my earlier post (http://friendlybacteriablog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/speaking-science.html) on the scientific language and the barrier it imposes, even the names of microbes pose a problem for this. Especially as they're often a mix of Latin, Greek and Science, which just confuses everyone even more. We call Ursus arcticus a brown bear, Canis lupus familiaris a dog, but there aren't any easy familiar words for microbes. Apart from Yeast, the rockstar of the microbial world, things are either referred to by the name of the disease they cause or just by the long, hard-to-say binomial names. Is that fair?

It's Nothing Personal; Unfriendly Microbes

I am ill. Blegh. (Not serious, just a cold.)

It's times like this when you have to ask; why, tiny microbes? Why do you do this to me? What did I ever do to you?

...I mean, I've consigned goodness knows how many bacteria to a steamy autoclave-based death, but that wasn't personal!

Microbiology before Microbes (were discovered)

The field of microbiology is relatively new, at least when compared to things like maths and physics and stuff, but microbes themselves have been around for a while now. Since life began! (That's probably debatable but that's not what I'm talking about today)

We've been interacting with microbes for a long time too, not just in terms of immunity and disease but in deliberate acts. So how did we go about doing microbiology before we discovered microbes? 

3 Months in perfect conditions

I have been writing this blog for three months now! That's totally a milestone now apparently. In that time I've written 35 posts about all sorts of things ranging from Red Kites to snow, Mental Health to clouds. But mainly about bacteria of the friendly variety! But what about the bacteria? What have they done in the last three months? Or rather, given three months and perfect growing conditions, what could they achieve? Probably a lot more than 35 blog posts! Time to work things out:

E. coli: the 'E' isn't for 'Evil'

It actually stands for 'escherichia' (which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, hence always just being called E coli).

Yesterday I was reading something about superbugs, and it listed E coli as one of the deadly ones. Everyone's always on the lookout for E coli contamination in food, restaurants, bathrooms etc. But is it really as scary as it's portrayed in the media?

Some strains are, definitely. K2 causes meningitis in newborn babies, O104H4 causes pretty nasty kidney damage (an outbreak in 2011 killed 52 people across the world) and scarily-named 'Entero-haemorrhagic E coli' strains like O157 cause bloody diarrhoea. Obviously being infected by any of these are on nobody's to-do-list, but just as the majority of bacteria as a whole don't cause disease, there are a huge range of E coli strains that aren't a threat at all. In fact, pretty much everyone has E coli as part of their normal community of gut bacteria! Animals included. That's partly why it's always looked for in restaurants and stuff; if it's in the intestines, then it'll be in what exits the intestines... so when they say 'we found E coli in 4/5 restaurants' they're basically saying there's faeces all over the place, so you should probably eat somewhere else until they start washing their hands! E coli  is therefore the poster boy for faecal contamination, but it's often more of a sign of contamination rather than the worst bacteria in there. It's just that it's much easier to  grow in the lab to detect, and that nowadays when there's so much genetic screening it's again easy to look for as we've got the whole genome sequenced. Often, food poisoning bacteria like Campylobacter jejuni are much more picky about what they want to grow on in the lab so it's quicker, cheaper and easier to just look for the E coli.

This is where E coli starts to redeem itself though; because it's so happy in lab conditions, it's really easy to work with! Everybody should love E coli. Not only is it easy to grow, it's pretty easy to insert genes into via various methods so we can customise it to be useful for all sorts of applications. One of the first examples of this, and one of my favourite examples of Friendly Bacteria, is the E coli that have been modified to produce human insulin. They first did this back in the seventies, and insulin is still made in this way to this day! Yeast is used sometimes too. Before that, they had to cut it out of corpses, or from pigs (which needed lots of accompanying medication).

I couldn't list all the ways E coli is used; a quick search for it on Google Scholar gives more than two and a half million different research papers using it! It's fair to say that without E coli we'd all be a lot worse off.

So should we fear E coli? No! It's our friend! (Apart from the baby-meningitis/bloody diarrhoea ones, feel free to fear them as much as you like)

World Book Day: Bacterionomicon

Today's World Book Day! To celebrate, I thought I'd write about my favourite bacteria-related book. It's not a textbook or medical guide, but the absolutely fantastic 'Bacterionomicon', produced by NerdcoreMedical.

What is it? It sounds like some kind of old-school medieval magical bestiary for Bacteria!

... Yep. That's pretty much what it is. And it's glorious.

The Bacterionomicon describes 40-odd species of pathogens as if they were fantastical beasts in a magical land called Soma, and the apothecaries of the healing blade (representing antibiotics). The descriptions are dramatic and exciting, but still actually really accurate medically too! There are different areas of Soma that represent parts of the body (like the 'Faecal Inlet'... lovely), and in the bestiary it says where each monster lives.

Listeria monocytogenes (I didn't make this, the authors of the book did! All credit goes to NerdcoreMedical. If I'm not allowed to have this picture here I'm happy to take it down)

It's not just fun to read, (or say out loud for that matter... Bacterionomicon...mmmm) the illustrations are beautiful to look at. Take a look at the one for Listeria monocytogenes, the one I blogged about the other day. It looks fearsome! The whole book is just packed with fantastic drawings.

There's also an awesome-looking card game called 'Healing Blade: Defenders of Soma' in the works that goes with it that I can't wait to try! It's not out yet but as soon as pay-day comes around I'll be pre-ordering a copy!

I don't know what else to say about it, I'm no book-reviewer, but if you like bacteria and are pretty nerdy, (i.e. someone like me!) then I'd definitely recommend it!

Don't just take my word for it, here are links for you to peruse:

http://nerdcoremedical.com/
http://bacterionomicon.com/

(I'm not affiliated with NerdcoreMedical in any way, I just think they're totally awesome)

Buttery Listeria

Tesco have recalled a load of their butter today, after they found listeria in some. But what's listeria? Should we be worried? And why is 'chocolate chip and maple syrup butter' a thing?

Listeria is a bacteria (that's why I'm talking about it!)  called Listeria monocytogenes. It's important (and worth worrying about/recalling weirdly flavoured butter over) for two key reasons: firstly, it loves the cold. This bug can happily grow in your fridge! Stopping bacteria grow is the whole point of fridges so listeria just makes a mockery of that. If it's growing, the number of bacteria goes up and up increasing the chances of getting ill if you eat it. So how ill does it make you? It normally just causes flu-like symptoms (in fact, there's a high chance you've had it but thought it was just the flu) but the second key reason it's important is a secondary effect: listeria can cause miscarriage. This is the reason you're supposed to avoid dairy stuff when pregnant (especially un-pasteurised cheeses like that fancy smelly french one you've got tucked away in the fridge). It does that to animals too; if a breeding herd of cows get fed contaminated food, they all get ill at once resulting in an 'abortion storm', which is pretty high up on my list of horrible phrases (right beside de-gloving accident) and obviously results in farmers losing animals and money, not to mention how it affects the poor cows.

I don't want to freak you out or make you stop eating cheese or whatever though (unless you're pregnant). All dairy food is tested constantly for all sorts of bacteria, and the tests for listeria are some of the most important. Any tiny amount of listeria in any product is always treated really seriously: while Tesco are losing out on the apparently lucrative flavoured-butter profits, the alternative is much, much worse. As a result of this, even when there's a scare like today's one you're pretty safe. Yes, listeria is one to avoid, but don't let the thought of it ruin your day!

It's not all bad though; listeria is being used in experiments looking at using it to treat cancer! It's really clever: normally our immune system recognises cancer cells as being our own cells, so leave them alone. But these researchers are modifying listeria cells to show markers for the cancer cells as well as their own (and to make them not cause disease obviously). When introduced to the body, the immune system looks at these modified listeria and starts associating them with the cancer cells. So the immune system starts thinking the cancer cells are listeria, and attacks them! Re-wiring the person's immune system to fight the cancer from within. This is still very much in the experimental phase, but it's a really exciting idea that I think is pretty promising! Plus it's a way that bacteria are being used for good (you can't get much more 'good' than fighting cancer) which I'm really enthused by and passionate about.