Μικροβιολογία / Microbiology

Meet the Microbiologist is a podcast hosted by Julie Wolf, Ph.D., that showcases the people behind the scientific discoveries. Each guest introduces their research in one of the cutting-edge areas of the microbial sciences: genomics, antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, emerging infectious diseases, microbial ecology, public health, probiotics, and more!

Welcome to Small Things Considered! This blog shares the excitement of unexpected and unusual stories of the microbial world. The main contributors to this blog are listed on your right. But we do not just publish our own content, we have many contributions from students, postdocs, and others. We enjoy this, in part because theirs is a world where scientific communication will increasingly involve social media. And this blog is a social medium. Don’t think that we do this to avoid work. We are dedicated editors who spend a lot of time going over the material we receive. We are eager to hear from you, so send us your comments, criticisms, submissions, ideas, or whatever else comes into your mind. Thank you for visiting.

Are you a company, lab or researcher planning a new microbiome study? If so, you are probably considering whether to conduct 16S rRNA gene sequencing or shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Although 16S rRNA gene sequencing has been more commonly used for microbiome studies to date, shotgun metagenomics is becoming more accessible and popular in microbiome research. However, each method has its pros and cons which should be considered before you decide which sequencing method to use. Here is your one-stop guide to 16S rRNA gene sequencing vs shotgun sequencing to help you generate the best data for your research.

Here you can explore the comprehensive and entirely free selection of teaching resources provided by the International Microbiology Literacy Initiative (IMiLI) that will inspire, excite and inform children and adults alike about microbes and their activities.

Think “we” not “me.”

I Contain Multitudes offers a new lens on life. With an eye on microbes—microscopic single-celled organisms—larger creatures such as ourselves suddenly look very different. Each of us is a more of a society than an individual. Only about half the cells in or on our bodies are human. The rest make up a menagerie of microbes. Microbes produce chemicals and vitamins that we can’t produce on our own, they help digest food, shape development, and influence behavior.

Ed Yong, author of the New York Times bestseller I Contain Multitudes, has teamed up with HHMI Tangled Banks Studios for a series that explores the strange, wondrous, and vital realm of the microscopic. Meet scientists and the microbes that captivate them. Watch fascinating animal behavior that makes sense only in light of a microbial backstory. Discover how the living world that we see is shaped by an invisible world. Our embrace of microbes, and theirs of us, is a pillar of life on Earth.

I'm Vincent Racaniello, Earth's virology Professor and I believe that education should be free. It's my goal to teach virology and other life sciences to the world. Here you'll find my lectures at Columbia University, our science shows This Week in Virology, This Week in Parasitism, This Week in Microbiology, This Week in Evolution, Immune, This Week in Neuroscience, Infectious Disease Puscast, Beyond the Noise, interviews that I've done with microbiologists, livestreams and more. Subscribe and stay tuned for future awesome science content.

Meet the Microbiologist is a podcast hosted by Ashley Hagen, M.S., that showcases the people behind the scientific discoveries. Each guest introduces their research in one of the cutting-edge areas of the microbial sciences: genomics, antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, emerging infectious diseases, microbial ecology, public health, probiotics and more!

The Bacterial Diversity Database BacDive is the worldwide largest knowledge base of standardized bacterial information. It has been selected as an ELIXIR Core Data Resource as well as a Global Core Biodata Resource. Its mission is to mobilize and make freely available strain-level research data from various sources. Major sources are internal files from culture collections (e.g. CABI, CCUG, CIP, DSMZ, JCM, KCTC) and extensive data manually extracted from species descriptions. Today, BacDive offers 2.6 million data points on 97,334 strains, including 20,060 type strains. Over 1000 data fields cover the topics taxonomy, morphology, physiology, metabolism, origin, biosafety, sequence data, and cultivation. Powerful tools such as the Advanced Search or the Isolation Source Search allow users to easily find strains based on their characteristics, e.g. strains that grow under certain conditions or strains isolated from a specific environment. The RESTful API and a SPARQL endpoint provide expert access to perform large-scale analysis on knowledge provided by BacDive.

Explore the microbiome of the world