Category: Images

This week’s image is brought to you via the ATCC 2013 photo contest. We give you – blood agar! (Twenty points if you can remember which bug prefers this most gruesome of mediums)

Depicted above is “Black-pigmented Porphyromonas gingivalis in blood-agar plates”. This photograph sadly doesn’t look like it has a good chance of winning, but it’s up against some stiff competition (who knew HeLa cells were so cute?) Head over to the gallery and check out the other entries here.

Red blood cells vs Bacillus anthracis, now in technicolor! More from Microbiology & Immunology – “A newly developed drug, modeled after a bacteriophage, is less likely to encounter antibiotic resistance. The drug mimics cell-wall busting viral enzymes called lysins. Viral lysins appear to resist bacterial evolution that would render them ineffective over time. The new drug, dubbed Epimerox, was tested against Bacillus anthracis.”

Read more here.

For those of you not 100% up to date on your ricin knowledge, we thought a quick refresher course might be useful.

Pictured above is the lowly castor bean, harvested and processed in the millions every year, and used in everything from castor oil to perfume.  Nearly five percent of the waste product (“mash”) in castor bean (bean being loosely used here – its actually the seeds of the plant Ricinus communis) production is the toxin ricin. Ricin can be synthesized as a powder, in aerosol form, dissolved in water, or as a pellet, the latter of which was used in the assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov.

Castor beans alone are extremely potent, with just a handful of beans capable of killing an adult human. The toxin ricin is several times more lethal –  less than 2 mg of ricin is thought to be capable of killing a human. Although extremely lethal, ricin is comparably easy to manufacture (Breaking Bad anyone?), making it a common weapon of choice for criminals and terrorists.

Ricin’s incubation period ranges from 4 to 24 hours, depending on the route of exposure. If exposed to a fine enough powder, inhalation of the toxin may occur,  resulting in flu-like symptoms – fever, cough, difficulty breathing – and gradually escalate to profuse sweating, pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation in the lungs) and eventually respiratory failure.

We give you – Ebola!

The virus and its sister, Marburg, are both marked by their distinct, filament-like morphology (which lead to their family name, Filoviridae)

Despite its high pathogenicity, filovirus infections have killed less than 2000 people since the virus family’s emergence in the late 1960s. Rigorous containment strategies are a big part of the lower fatality numbers – once infected, supportive care is the only available treatment. The natural reservoirs of the virus (not us) remain unknown.

So if for some reason you find this staring up at you from under an (extremely powerful) microscope, hold your breath and run (joke, that was a joke).

To learn more about everyone’s favorite hemorrhagic fever, check out the Federation of American Scientist’s Fact Sheet.

E.Coli Fireworks!

Description via the American Society for Microbiology:

“Each bright dot marks a surface protein that tells the bacteria to move toward or away from nearby food and toxins. Using a new imaging technique, researchers can map the proteins one at a time and combine them into a single image. This lets them study patterns within and among protein clusters in bacterial cells, which don’t have nuclei or organelles like plant and animal cells. Seeing how the proteins arrange themselves should help researchers better understand how cell signaling works.”

Credit Line
Derek Greenfield and Ann McEvoy, University of California, Berkeley”