Meet the Microbiologist

Raymond St. Leger describes his work on insect pathogenic fungi. Members of this diverse group of fungi can be found as part of the plant rhizosphere, where they provide nutrients to the plant, and can also be deployed as insect control agents. Raymond discusses his work with communities in Burkina Faso, where he works with officials to educate and gain consent for use of mosquito-killing fungi to control the spread of malaria. Host: Julie Wolf Subscribe (free) on iPhone, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Julie's biggest takeaways: Insect-pathogenic fungi living in plant roots can pass nitrogen from killed insects to their plant hosts, receiving different carbon nutrients from the plants in return. Fungi harvested after growth on inexpensive materials like chicken droppings are used in agriculture both as fertilizer and as insecticide. Cyclosporine was first discovered in insect-pathogenic fungi. Raymond St. Leger and other scientists working to introduce genetically modified microbes into the environment deeply consider the societal effects of their work, including collaboration with local communities, governmental regulatory bodies, and trusted leaders and tailor their efforts to the regional area. Featured Quotes: "Possibly fungi kill more organisms than any other disease-causing agents." (2:55) "People are interested in how you can utilize a plant-root colonizing Metarhizium as a comprehensive biofertilizer." (14:30) "Put elite Metarhizium onto corn seeds and you can boost the growth of corn by about 30%." (14:50) "Mosquitos and malaria have no friends." (23:17) "If an insect is especially common, then a strain of Metarhizium will specialize to that insect." (24:35) “There’s a lot of different ethical, political, and social concerns we have to address and we have to resolve before any type of genetically manipulated product can be introduced. We even have questions about the meaning of informed consent!" (28: 30) "Synbio-phobia-phobia: the belief that genetic engineers have that people are going to be frightened of their work."(32:00) "In Burkina Faso, you can expect to get more than 200 bites from Anopholes gambiae a day. This is malaria central." (37:58) Links for this episode Raymond St. Leger website at the University of Maryland St. Leger lab research explained in a three-minute video NPR story covering fungal pesticides as alternatives to chemicals Discover Magazine blog on malaria-fighting Frankenfungus CHOMA tidbit: Felix d'Herelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology by Bill Summers (Excerpt of Chapter 3. Epizootics: Locusts in Argentina and Algeria). Send your stories about our guests and/or your comments (email or recorded audio) to jwolf@asmusa.org.

Vincent Racaniello discusses how he ended up studying polio virus and the three eureka moments he’s experienced so far: uncovering the polio genome, discovering the polio receptor, and generating a mouse model of polio disease. Vincent discusses his interest in science communications, including his blog and active podcast network. Host: Julie Wolf Activities of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in the Field of Virus Research (free) on iPhone, Android, RSS, or by email. You can also listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app. Julie's biggest takeaways: All three polio virus serotypes are covered by the polio vaccine; type 2 has been eradicated and type 3 is close to being eradicated. Enterovirus 68 is a related enteroviruses that is associated with paralysis, but its receptor and disease progression remain largely unknown. Developing tools and techniques to study one virus that can cross into the central nervous system, such as polio, can set up a lab to study other neurotropic viruses, such as enterovirus 68 and Zika virus. All scientists with access to a computer and a social media account can be effective science communicators! Featured Quotes: "You have to find people to be mentors who you are going to listen to, and if they give you advice, you follow it." (6:57) "It took me one year to sequence the genome of polio, which you could do in five minutes today." (9:52) "We work on infectious agents and a big part of it is to eradicate them and alleviate human disease." (20:32) "On facebook, you’ve lots of friends who are following you; if you show them science, some of them will listen to it." (33:30) "We all have to share what we do. We’re funded mostly by tax dollars, and we have to let the public know what we do." (34:00) Links for this episode Vincent Racaniello Zika Diaries: a blog about the Racaniello lab experiences studying Zika Virus Virology Blog This Week in Virology Scientists: Engage the Public! CHOMA tidbit: Activities of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in the Field of Virus Research by Paul de Kruif Send your stories about our guests and/or your comments (email or recorded audio) to jwolf@asmusa.org.

Welcome back, Meet the Scientist subscribers! For those of you who never heard an episode of Meet the Scientist, thanks for taking a listen. We're excited to tell all of you we're now Meet the Microbiologist (MTM). MTM is the same great, one-on-one conversations captured in Meet the Scientist just with a new name and a new host.  Julie Wolf of the American Society for Microbiology will be bringing back the podcast with all new episodes with scientists who work in one of the many areas of the microbial sciences — genomics, antibiotic resistance, virology, synthetic biology, emerging infectious diseases, microbial ecology, public health, probiotics, and more! The first two new episodes will be released September 28th, beginning with an episode with Vincent Racaneillo of This Week in Microbiology taking about his research on polio and Zika virus, and his experience as a science communicator. The other episode, released the same day, is with Raymond St. James discussing applications of insect-pathogenic fungi as plant fertilizers and mosquito control agents.  Make sure to subscribe, for free, wherever you listen to podcasts including iTunes, Android, or get each episode delivered by email. Subscribing to the podcast is the best way to make sure you never miss an episode! Talk to you soon!

In this podcast, I speak to Martin Blaser, Frederick H. King Professor of Internal Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine and Professor of Microbiology at the New York School of Medicine. Blaser studies Helicobacter pylori, bacteria that live in the stomachs of billions of people. Blaser has shown that H. pylori has a strange double life inside of us. On the one hand, it can cause ulcers and gastric cancer. On the other hand, it can protect us from diseases of the esophagus, allergies, asthma, and perhaps even obesity. We're now eradicating H. pylori with antibiotics and other luxuries of modern life; Blaser thinks we ought to bring it back--but keep it on a tight leash.

All life hums with electricity, from our heartbeats to the electrons that flow to the oxygen we breathe.But some bacteria are electricians par excellence, generating electric currents in the soil and water. In this podcast, I talk to microbe-electricity expert Jeff Gralnick of the University of Minnesota about the biology behind these currents, and how engineers may be able to harness it to power technology.

In this podcast I talk to Jessica Green of the University of Oregon about aerobiology: the science of life in the air. We live in an invisible ocean of life, with millions of microbes swarming around us. Microbes can live many miles high in the upper atmosphere, and they may actually be able to feed and grow in clouds. Green and I talk not just about high-altitude aerobiology, but about the microbes we share our homes and offices with, and how better understanding them can help our health.

In this podcast, I talk to Charles Bamforth of the University of California, Davis, about the surprisingly complex chemistry of beer, and the pivotal role microbes play in making it happen.

In this podcast I talk to Thomas Scott of the University of California, Davis, about dengue fever, a disease that's on the rise. Spread by mosquitoes, it can make you feel as if your bones are broken and leave you exhausted for months. In more serious cases, people suffer uncontrollable bleeding and sometimes die. Dengue is expanding its range, and is even making incursions into the United States. Scott and I talk about what scientists know and don't know yet about dengue, and what the best strategy will be to drive the virus down.

In this podcast I talk to Charles Ofria, a computer scientist at Michigan State University. Ofria and his colleagues have created a program called Avida in which digital organisms can multiply and evolve. They are studying many of evolution's deepest questions, such as how complexity evolves from simplicity and why individuals make sacrifices for each other. The evolution unfolding in Avida is also yielded new software that can run robots and sensors in the real world. Bonus Content includes: Avida Movie In this movie, we started with a normal Avida organism in the middle of the population and let it grow for a while before injecting a highly-virulent parasite into the middle.  The hosts are all colored with shades of blue and the parasites are shades of red.

In this podcast I spoke to David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington. Baker and his colleagues study how proteins fold, taking on the complex shapes that make our lives possible. It turns out that protein folding is a fiendishly hard problem to solve, and even the  most sophisticated computers do a poor job of solving it. So Baker and his colleagues have enlisted tens of thousands of people to play a protein-folding game called Foldit. I talked to David Baker about the discoveries they've made through crowdsourcing, and the challenges of getting 57,000 co-authors listed on a paper. Additional Resources: Rosetta@Home Foldit