Tag Archive | bacteria
The Big Picture for the Microbiome
UChicago physicians and scientists gathered recently for a seminar on how the microbiome affects our health.
Deep Sequencing the English Channel, Or How You Can Find Any Microbe If You Look Hard Enough
Microbiologists scan a sample of seawater from the English Channel and find that if you look hard enough, you can find almost every microbe species on the planet.
Meet Your Roommates at Our New Hospital
The first patients at our new Center for Care and Discovery will move in on February 23, but they’ll have some roommates already. At the PLOS Public Health Perspectives blog, Beth Skwarecki writes about environmental microbiologist Jack Gilbert’s Hospital Microbiome Project to track the microbes growing in our new hospital: A microbial community has to […]
Exactly How Do You Collect 12,000 Microbial Samples From a Hospital?
Last month I wrote about the Hospital Microbiome project, Jack Gilbert’s ambitious project to catalog the bacterial species growing in the hospital before it opens and monitor how that environment changes after doctors and patients start interacting with it. Over the next two years, he and his team will be collecting more than 12,000 samples […]
LabBook December 7, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Bacteria Before and After: Mapping the Microbiome of a New Hospital
In February we’ll open the doors of the Center for Care and Discovery to hundreds of patients, medical staff and visitors. But they won’t be the first residents of our new hospital: The building will already be colonized by millions of bacteria, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Jack Gilbert, PhD, assistant professor of […]
Mercy, Mercy, MRSA
In her 2010 book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, author and self-proclaimed “disease geek” Maryn McKenna charted the steady advance of a treatment-resistant organism which she referred to as a “crisis in many dimensions.” MRSA illustrates “failures of science, failures of the marketplace, and failures of support for research and innovation,” McKenna wrote. Since […]
The Western Diet’s Immune Impact
Inflammatory bowel disease is an ailment on the rise. A European study found that the incidence of IBD roughly doubled from 1990 to 2001, and even larger surges in IBD cases have been observed in areas of the United States and Europe studied since 1965. But intriguingly, this epidemic of IBD appears to be localized […]
Brucella and the Fake Self-Destruct
By Rob Mitchum Brucella abortus is a particularly pesky pathogen. Frequently infecting cattle in many countries around the world, the bacterium causes the most common zoonotic infection, usually passing from animal to humans through ingestion of unpasteurized dairy products. While the infection, known as brucellosis or undulant fever, is rarely deadly, it can cause assorted […]
Morphine’s Bad Influence on the Microbiome
Painkillers are an important tool in the hospital. After major surgery, relieving a patient’s pain using morphine and other opiates helps their recovery and quality of life while the body heals. But these drugs are not without their side effects and risks, from the potential for dependence to symptoms such as nausea, constipation, and itching. […]
