BacterioFiles Micro Edition 148 - Engineered Escherichia Enzyme Enhances Environmentalism

This episode: Engineered bacteria could help capture CO₂ and convert it into a solid form for storage!

Download Episode (7.3 MB, 8 minutes)

Show notes:
Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Even some adults could benefit from rural microbes
**-20ºC Antarctic microbes exchange genetic material relatively frequently
**Revamping glycolysis for biofuels so less carbon is lost as CO₂
**Engineered bacteria could help clean up water and soil
**Bacterial battery could recover energy from marine dead zones (paper)

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 147 - Clostridium Conquers Colleagues

This episode: Non-pathogenic Clostridium difficile strains can protect hamsters against their disease-causing bacterial siblings!

Download Episode (7 MB, 7.5 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Forensics could observe state of bacterial activity to determine when someone died
**Microbes could be a partial living history of other forms of life
**Viruses enter and affect mammalian cells but don't cause harm
**Step toward helping more plants cooperate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria
**Engineering E. coli to produce straight-up gasoline

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

New Domain Name

In case you hadn't noticed, the show's website is now bacteriofiles.com. Thanks to listener Andrew Billo for his donation!

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 146 - Engineered Escherichia Eliminates Enemies

This episode: Scientists engineered E. coli to seek and destroy pathogens!

Download Episode (10 MB, 11 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Soil microbes are very important for plants
**Bacteria tolerate fluoride by having really weird transporter proteins
**Bacteria-produced silk could shield medicinal proteins until they're needed
**Researchers discover very small marine microbe
**Pest insects team up with bacteria to avoid plant defenses (paper)

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 145 - Clostridium Converts Cortisol

This episode: Gut bacteria may convert cortisol into important human hormones!

Download Episode (6 MB, 6.5 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Frozen microbes could possibly survive a fall from outer space to Earth
**Infecting fungus creates zombie ants
**Importance of bacteria recognized even 120 years ago
**Using microbes to generate electricity by breaking down wastewater
**Newly discovered eukaryotic microbe helps show what doesn't make multicellular organisms unique

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 144 - Copper Chelator Calms Quicksilver

This episode: Bacteria could reduce mercury's toxicity in their environment!

Download Episode (6.5 MB, 7 minutes)

Show notes:
Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Symbiotic bacteria help plant pests trick their host plants
**Finding ancient organisms in Antarctic ice
**Immune system regulates skin microbe communities (paper)
**Panda gut microbes could be pretty good for cellulose biofuel production
**Cold doesn't seem to prevent microbes from eating polluting hydrocarbons

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 143 - Parasites Prevent Paired Pestilences

This episode: Gut parasites may fight each other to infect!

Download Episode (9.7 MB, 10.6 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Fungus-bacterium community does well producing biofuel from cellulose (paper)
**Improving microbes' ability to generate electricity
**Cyanobacterium can produce 5 different biofuels
**Sequencing-based community sampling may overestimate microbial diversity (paper)
**Bacteria could help harvest biofuel algae by clumping them together (paper)

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 142 - Diversity Determines Dimensions

This episode: Higher gut bacterial diversity is correlated with lower obesity and related problems!

Download Episode (6.1 MB, 6.6 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Gut bacteria may influence weight gain when quitting smoking
**Probiotic can inhibit pathogen motility (paper)
**Microbes deep under sea floor divide every 10,000 years
**Searching sea microbes for promising new chemicals
**Stick bug gut bacteria seem to make good antibacterial compounds

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 141 - Sulfuric Slurry Cells Store Cerium

This episode: Bacteria in a volcanic mudpot require rare earth elements to grow!

Download Episode (6.2 MB, 6.75 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Scientists may develop a bacterial toxin that kills mosquitoes
**Fungus-like bacteria could help reduce potato disease (paper)
**Microbiology report makes suggestions for feeding the world
**Bacteria from termite gut could help produce biofuels
**Microbes that are important for creating delicious fermented foods

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 140 - Transposon Tunes Timely Transcription

This episode: "Selfish" jumping gene is actually helpful for its host plant's resistance to disease!

Download Episode (5.56 MB, 6 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Gut microbes may make difference in autoimmunity between males and females
**Helpful fungal symbiont prevents growth of toxin-producing fungi in potatoes (paper)
**Modified soil bacteria could treat parasite infections (paper)
**Mothers transfer good bacteria to babies through breastmilk
**Pollution-degrading bacteria are more common than was known

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 139 - Tamed Trespassers Treat Tumors

This episode: Inactivated virus particles may treat cancer or even vaccinate against it!

Download Episode (5.8 MB, 6.25 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Students try to make perpetual lightbulb out of glowing bacteria
**Nematode carries around bacterial coat that it can use as a snack
**Predatory bacteria could be used to treat drug-resistant pathogens
**Fungus and bacterium work together to make biofuels out of plant waste
**Microbes may be able to survive down to -20C, but no lower

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 138 - Slime Sustains Sidekick Pseudomonas

This episode: Slime mold cells carry bacteria with them, some for food and some for chemical warfare!

Download Episode (6.4 MB, 7 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Vaccines using Salmonella could now pass through the stomach, becoming more effective
**C-section might not be as good for infants' gut communities
**Useful RNA-based technique for modifying biotech cells' metabolism
**Protein allows gut cells to tolerate good bacteria and depend on them for protection from pathogens
**Bacteria may be better way to clean chemicals from water supply

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What I've been doing in my lab

...for those who are curious.

I took this picture a while ago so I don't remember exactly what was growing, but it definitely included some strain of a soil bacterium.

The point of the complicated setup is to be able to keep these bacteria in a constant state of healthy proliferation; that is, about every 5-10 hours (depending on the strain), every cell in the tank in the center will have divided into two new cells, effectively doubling the population.

This is called exponential growth, because when this takes place in a flask of a given amount of broth, nothing added or removed, the size of the population doubles every 5-10 hours, so the number of cells in the population, if you start with 2, is 2 to the nth power, where n is the number of 5-to-10-hour periods (depending on the strain) that have passed. So after 5-10 hours, there will be 4 cells, then after 10-15 hours, 8 cells, then 16, then 32, then 64, and it goes up exponentially.

However, this is not the case in this picture, because rather than having a given amount of broth, there's a bottle of fresh broth outside the frame up above, and new broth is being added to tank where the bacteria are growing, so their food is being constantly replenished at a certain rate. At the same time, the volume in the tank is being kept constant by removing excess material, including the cells in it, thus reducing the size of the population. So the size of the population of bacteria effectively remains constant over time.

The point of this is to study the behavior of the bacteria. There are some good reasons to maintain a population of bacteria this way; for one thing, you can repeatedly make changes to the broth you're feeding them, or other environmental factors, to see how the behavior changes, without having to repeatedly clean out and sterilize the tank, add fresh medium, and inoculate it again.

In my case, what I'm currently doing, is trying to figure out how much hydrogen gas my bacteria produce when I feed them a certain amount of sugar. As long as they have everything else that they need, it should be the case that the more sugar I give them, the more hydrogen they produce, and I'm trying to quantify the relationship between those two factors.

In order to do that, I make a tank of broth with a known amount of sugar, feed it to the bacteria until the population size stabilizes, and measure the amount of hydrogen they produce with that white box to the left. I'm also measuring the size of the population using other methods. Then, I increase the concentration of sugar in the broth, keeping everything else the same, let the population stabilize, and measure the new values of hydrogen and population size. Once I've done this a few times, I can make a graph of hydrogen produced per gram of sugar added or something.

The other cool thing about the setup in this picture is that it allows me to control many environmental factors and take measurements in real time: the unit on the right is a unit that controls and takes measurements, and it can measure the amount of oxygen in the tank, the pH, the temperature, and how much broth is left in the tank, and it uploads these values to a computer on the other side of the bench. It feeds in air (for oxygen) at a certain rate, controls the stirring (to help the oxygen dissolve), and pumps water through a jacket around the tank to control the temperature. There are also sensors on the other side that measure the concentrations of certain gases that come out of the tank, and the computer records those too. So it's a lot of control and information.

That's about it for this kind of experiment. In case I've kept your attention this long and you're interested in more, I started a new blog here to help myself review papers for my own research, so feel free to check it out.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 137 - Germ's Jammer Jumpstarts Genes

This episode: Pathogen's CRISPR-Cas system (for defense against viruses) can be modified to change gene expression in mammals!

Download Episode (6.3 MB, 6.9 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**New potential antibiotic discovered in marine bacteria
**Some bacteria make pretty patterns
**Bacteria manipulate plants; same mechanism could help treat genetic diseases
**Microbes could convert CO₂ directly to biofuels
**Color-changing Antarctic heat-loving bacteria transform gold ions into useful nanoparticles (paper)

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 136 - Swarmers Send Secret Signals

This episode: Swarming predatory bacteria may be communicating through tubes!

Download Episode (6.3 MB, 6.9 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Algae intended for biofuels turn out to be very good in desserts
**Man found whose own gut seems to brew alcohol
**Viruses useful for controlling crop pests
**Deep sea glowing of bacteria changes based on surface conditions
**Bacterial investment strategies could teach some things to human investors

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 135 - Prodigious Pandora Particles Perceived

This episode: New giant virus discovered, with a genome larger than that of some eukaryotes!

Download Episode (7.5 MB, 8.1 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/News item 3/News item 4/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Using bacteria as factories to produce drugs, originally found in plants, cheaply
**Ocean bacteria can "see" by sensing the color of light and adjusting their behavior
**Though many gut viruses are stable, some change rapidly over time
**Reducing need for fertilizer by creating artificial plant-bacteria symbioses
**Fungal symbionts help plants tolerate heat and drought (paper)

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 134 - Duodenum Dweller Degrades Digoxin

This episode: Bacteria in the gut can affect dosaging of medications!

Download Episode (7.1 MB, 7.75 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 133 - Microbe Manacles Metal, Muzzles Microbe

This episode: A strain of E. coli helps reduce severity of Salmonella infection by competing with it for iron in the gut!

Download Episode (7.6 MB, 8.3 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe at iTunes, check out the show at Twitter, MicrobeWorld, or Facebook

This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 132 - Microbes Modify Mitochrondrial Material

This episode: Some bacterial DNA sequence seems to integrate into human cells, especially in cancerous tissue!

Download Episode (11.3 MB, 12.3 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper/Review of animal-bacterial lateral gene transfer

Other interesting stories:

**Bacteria are important for health of corals
**Desert bacterium makes more and better bioplastic
**Fungi that can survive at negative temperatures, and how (paper)
**Crop rotation helps maintain diversity of soil community
**Gut microbes can contribute to speciation, in insects

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 131 - Stacking Sucker Symbionts

This episode: Some insects have bacterial symbionts with super-small genomes inside their cells, and some of these symbionts have their own internal bacterial symbionts!

Download Episode (6.7 MB, 7.3 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/News item 3/Journal Paper

Crowdfunding opportunity to help clean up the environment with microbes

Other interesting stories:

**Making art with plates of glowing bacteria
**Predatory bacteria seem to be helpful for treating eye infections
**Bacteria floating all around the earth, could help with climate
**Making bioplastic polymers is important even in bacterium-insect symbioses (paper)
**New strains of bacteria could make better biofuels

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

Crowd-funding: Help Support Research into Using Bacteria to Clean Up the Environment

I've been interested in crowd-funding science for a while. Science is one of the best investments a society can make, so why not let society invest in it directly? There are many research proposals people have made on different crowdfunding websites, but here is one that is relevant to the interests of this show:

Directing the Evolution of Bacteria to Clean Up Toxic Waste

This research team is using directed evolution to develop strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that can chelate and remove heavy metal contaminants from the environment. They're trying to raise money directly from the public to support their research. If you want to participate in this project, at least indirectly, you can donate and/or spread the word!

From the site: "Heavy metal pollution is more common than most people realize and it causes serious environmental and health problems. Our research aims to clean up this toxic waste using organisms modified by a process called directed evolution."

Click the link for more information. For science!

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 130 - Bacteriophages Bind Boogers

This episode: Phages hang out in mucus to ambush bacteria!

Download Episode (6.4 MB, 7 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Green algae eat bacteria, suggesting route for origin of eukaryotes
**Bacteria could help clean up estrogen contaminants in drinking water
**Bacteria help clean up poop-filled cave
**Microbes could help with making Mars habitable
**Virus gene therapy helps the blind see

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 129 - Lentivirus Limits Leukodystrophy

This episode: Virus acts as vector to cure deadly genetic disorder!

Download Episode (5.4 MB, 5.8 minutes)

Show notes:
Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Lentiviral Hematopoietic Stem Cell Gene Therapy in Patients with Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome (paper)
**Bacterial proteins filter and recycle antibiotics in streams
**Survey of fungi living on our skin
**Dogs have a big effect on bacteria found in the home
**Bacteria found that break the coldest-living-organism record

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 128 - Algae Aggregate Ammonium Altruistically

This episode: Algal symbionts store nutrients for corals!

Download Episode (3.9 MB, 4 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Certain gut bacteria could help reduce obesity, in mice at least
**Michael Pollan: "Some of My Best Friends Are Germs" Interview with Pollan
**Bacterial travel paths make pretty good art
**Bacteria can use hydrogen gas to produce electricity, a real microbial fuel cell
**Gut bacteria could protect against pathogenic E. coli

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 127 - Plant Partners Prompt Pest Preparation

This episode: Fungi transmit warning signals between plants!

Download Episode (7.4 MB, 8 minutes)

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Parents sucking on infants' pacifiers may help provide good bacteria
**Using ancient bacterial samples to create record of local supernovas
**Phages could help prevent medical implant contamination
**Bacteria that colonize infants' gut can influence their growth
**Using bacteria in mosquitoes to stop malaria

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 126 - Tamed Trespasser Tramples Tumors

This episode: A harmless pathogen strain combined with radioactivity can fight pancreatic cancer!

Download Episode (5.3 MB, 5.8 minutes)

Show notes:
News item 1/News item 2/News item 3/Journal Paper
Video of Listeria swimming around inside cells

Other interesting stories:

**Finding new electricity-generating species of bacteria (paper)
**Trials starting to heal people's hearts using modified virus
**Soil bacteria could form barrier to prevent rice from taking up arsenic
**Strange cobwebby bacteria are growing in spent nuclear fuel cooling tanks
**Bacteria are living high up in hurricanes

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 125 - Phototroph Fusion Fights Fevers

This episode: Green algae could help create new cheaper, more stable vaccines for developing countries!

Download Episode (4.5 MB, 5 minutes)
Transcript

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Some dirt in the diet could be very healthy
**Gut bacteria seem to kill Salmonella directly
**Bacteria may influence biological clocks, at least in squid
**Protein in mountain bacteria similar enough to brain protein to allow comparison
**Soil bacterium could reduce contamination of crops with deadly fungal toxin (paper)

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Special Edition - ASM2013 General Meeting Day 4

Presenting my poster

Here's my summary of the fourth and final day of ASM2013, with a special surprise guest appearance at the end!

Session 1: Synthetic Genomics to Create a Minimal Bacterial Cell and Some Other Neat Stuff
Presented by John I. Glass
He talked about the cell with the synthetic genome (full episode 13), and about how important it is to determine what is the minimal amount of genome a cell needs to grow--knowing that, you can start there and build almost anything you want.
He also talked about a new method of producing new flu strains for vaccine production using synthetic nucleic acids, which could greatly shorten the time it takes to get a new vaccine going to counter a pandemic.

Session 2: C. difficile vs. the Microbiota: The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
Presented by Shonna McBride
When a probiotic (Lactococcus lactis) was grown with C. difficile, the latter was killed.

Session 3: An Intriguing Bacterial Symbiont in the Nucleus of Amoebae
Presented by Frederik Schulz
Interactions between amoebae and bacteria are interesting and also relevant to our health, considering the similarities between amoebae and cells of our immune system. This interaction is particularly interesting: bacteria living inside the nucleus.

Download Episode (5.5 MB, 6 minutes)

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BacterioFiles Special Edition - ASM2013 General Meeting Day 3

Here's my summary of the third day of ASM2013, wherein I met with neat people and ideas.

Session 1: Microbe-Microbe Interactions - Cell Contact-Dependent Outer Membrane Exchange in Myxobacteria
Presented by Dan Wall
Myxobacteria are super cool, a fascinating example of complex cooperative behavior in relatively simple single-celled organisms. They swarm around eating other bacteria until they get low on food, at which point they gather together to form reproductive structures called fruiting bodies to spread to new environments.
As part of the mechanism they use to coordinate their activity and distinguish between friends and foes, they seem to exchange components of their outer membrane, but only with closely-related strains.

Poster: 1485 - Understanding the Syntrophic Metabolism of a Bacterial Co-culture for Hydrogen Production
(Combination of Clostridium cellulolyticum and Rhodopseudomonas palustris to convert cellulosic plant material into hydrogen)
Y. Jiao, A. Navid, B. Stewart, J. McKinlay, M. Thelen, J. Pett-Ridge

Poster: 1702 - Non-Photosynthetic, Deep-Branching Cyanobacteria of the Human Gut and Subsurface Permit Inference of the Cyanobacterial Ancestor
S.C. Di Rienzi, I. Sharon, K.C. Wrighton, O. Koren, L.A. Hug, B.C. Thomas, J.K. Goodrich, J.T. Bell, T.D. Spector, J.F. Banfield, R.E. Ley

This Week in Microbiology 56: Live at ASM in Denver

They started out talking about scientific misconduct with Ferric Fang, then with Andrew Camilli about the virus with a CRISPR system (listen at about 1 hour 2 min in to hear my question!), and also with Suzanne Fleiszig and Michelle Swanson about a gruesome-sounding eye infection and defenses against intracellular bacteria. You should give it a listen (or watch)!

Download Episode (4.3 MB, 4.6 minutes)

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BacterioFiles Special Edition - ASM2013 General Meeting Day 2

Here's my summary of the second day of ASM2013, an exciting day full of science.

Session 1: Pumping at the Microbial Well
Section 1: Advanced Plant to Advanced Fuel
Presented by Jay D. Keasling,
In order to produce long-chain carbon compounds for diesel and jet fuels, it is possible to engineer bacteria like E. coli to produce them the way they produce long fatty acids for their membranes, but in a better form for extraction. Also, plants produce many terpene compounds for defense, such as bisabolene, that can also be good for fuel, and bacteria can be engineered to produce these too, but it can be tricky due to these compounds' toxicity.
Paper on good efflux pumps for biofuel production: Dunlop et al, 2011, Mol. Sys. Biol. 7:487 doi: 10.1038/msb.2011.21

Section 2: Is There a Path to Cellulosic Biofuels?
Presented by Thomas W. Jeffries
His main point was that the use of fossil fuels should be a transitional state between the pre-industrial era and a sustainable system of renewable energy. Fossil fuels should be an investment in the future, not something we should build our whole infrastructure around. They are going to run out someday, after all.

Poster: 280 - Comparisons of CRISPR Content Between Saliva and Skin: Viral Exposures May Not Be Body Site Specific
R. Robles-Sikisaka, M. Naidu, M. Ly, J. Saizman, S.R. Abeles, T. Boehm, D.T. Pride

Session 2: Uncovering the Function of Unknown Proteins
Section 1: Evolution and the Proteome: Insights into Protein Function from Deeply Conserved Gene Modules
Presented by Edward Marcotte
How should one go about figuring out the function of unknown proteins? Possibly by comparing homologs in other, even distantly related organisms. Even homologous genes in yeast and humans can have similar functions. And of the ~500 essential proteins in yeast that have human homologues, 60% of them can be replaced with the human version and the yeast will still be viable.

Section 2: Small Proteins Can No Longer Be Ignored
Presented by Gisela Storz
Her group has discovered some bacterial proteins smaller than 50 amino acids long, that seem to be related to metal metabolism.

Download Episode (7.36 MB, 8 minutes)

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BacterioFiles Special Edition - ASM2013 General Meeting Day 1

I went to the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, in Denver, Colorado, and I wanted to share some of the fascinating science that I experienced. So here's my summary of the first day!

Section 1: I missed it because Denver is confusing and it took me so long to find parking. Apparently it was interesting, though, discussing how a certain bacterium, Caulobacter crescentus, divides into two daughter cells, one that holds onto a surface and the other that swims away.

Section 2: The Killers, the Cures, and the Limits of Life: Frontiers of Science in the Unseen World
Presented by Nathan D. Wolfe
I missed some of this section, but what I heard was interesting, about how endogenous retroviruses may have made mammalian development possible, and how significant portions of the microbial world may still be unknown.

Section 3: Engineering by Evolution
Presented by Frances Arnold
This was quite interesting. As an engineer, Dr. Arnold is interested in making cells and their enzymes do stuff, so she works on improving their abilities. There is tremendous diversity of amino acid sequences (i.e. proteins) in nature, but it represents only a small amount of the possible combinations of amino acids. Most such combinations are useless as enzymes, but a few are even more effective than anything (yet found) in nature. Dr. Arnold discussed how to find these combinations.
Here is the paper published about the heat-stable cellulases that I discussed: Wu and Arnold, 2013, Biotechnol. Bioeng. 110:1874 doi: 10.1002/bit.24864.

Download Episode (6.45 MB, 7 minutes)

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BacterioFiles Micro Edition 124 - Chlamydomonas Constructs Coming Coal

This episode: Green algae's hydrogen production is analyzed and improved!

Download Episode (3.8 MB, 4.1 minutes)
Transcript

Show notes:
News item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Scientists take protein from flesh-eating bacteria and make useful adhesive
**Fungus from horse gut could be good for breaking down plant material for biofuels
**Dogs are an important influence on our microbiota
**Bacterial fossils could contain evidence of an ancient supernova
**E. coli modified to produce imitation petroleum

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 123 - Proteobacteria Protonate Poison

This episode: Soil microbe has a good enzyme for degrading cyanide pollution!

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Transcript

Show notes:
Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Company developing virus to treat cancer
**Prions help fungi regulate their multicellularity
**History and status of phage therapy
**Protists from termite gut named after elder gods
**Screening many chemicals, scientists found some that increase algal oil production

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe at iTunes, check out the show at Twitter, MicrobeWorld, or Facebook

This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 122 - Coliforms Consume Caffeine Compulsively

This episode: Scientists engineer E. coli to be addicted to caffeine!

Download Episode (4.3 MB, 4.75 minutes)
Transcript

Show notes:
News Item 1/News Item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Figuring out how microbes survive in salty freezing lakes
**Bacterial wires conduct electricity because of certain amino acids
**Making cyanobacteria produce butanol biofuel
**Byproduct of algal biofuel production could be made into biodegradable plastic
**Phage therapy looking more promising

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe at iTunes, check out the show at Twitter, MicrobeWorld, or Facebook

This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 121 - Horizontal Hacks Help Harsh Habitation

This episode: Alga adapts to hot, toxic environments by copying prokaryote genes!

Download Episode (3.4 MB, 3.75 minutes)
Transcript

Show notes:
News Item 1/News Item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Same species of bacteria that causes acne might also protect against it
**Bacteria in sourdough bread inhibit mold growth
**Navy develops device to treat wastewater and produce electricity simultaneously
**Marine bacteria could make useful new antibiotics
**Fungi seem to protect plant foliage from leaf-cutter ants

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 120 - Particles Pirate Prokaryote Protection

This episode: A virus has borrowed a bacterium's defenses to infect better!

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Transcript

Show notes:
News Item 1/News Item 2/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Signals from neighbors tell bacteria to induce phage resistance
**Man-made wetland filled with bacteria could clean waste pharmaceuticals from water
**Bacteria seem to have specific relationships with apple tree flowers
**Reintroducing healthy gut community clears out drug-resistant pathogens in mice
**Weaving bacteriophages into packaging to help food safety (paper)

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

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This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.

BacterioFiles Micro Edition 119 - Bacteria Bypass Blood-Brain Barrier?

This episode: Our brain might be home to helpful bacteria!

Download Episode (3.5 MB, 3.75 minutes)
Transcript

Show notes:
News Item/Journal Paper

Other interesting stories:

**Antarctic bacteria cling to ice crystals
**Viruses could actually be helpful for plants
**Probiotic bacteria seemed to help male mice's bone density
**Marine microbe's enzyme could break down sinusitis biofilms
**Yeast engineered to produce butanol in its mitochondria

Post questions or comments here or email to bacteriofiles@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Subscribe at iTunes, check out the show at Twitter, MicrobeWorld, or Facebook

This show features music from Mevio's podsafe Music Alley.