Eric Pollitt

Erm its Mycobacterium smegmatis, to come back to @evolvedbiofilm.bsky.social figure of sliding colonies we investigated the obviously odd one out (its not round or producing fronds) and found it was doing new additional things you normally do not see in sliding bacteria

Personally I think live in situ microscopy is critical when identifying motility as Henrichsen did when forming the definition of swarming twitching gliding etc in the first place pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... (and its not done as much as it should be...)

note, gliding is not comparable to sliding

the here described spreading is very similar to sliding (=spreading by growth and facilitating compounds, like polysaccharides), which was known for Salmonella - the authors are not fully correct stating that sliding always depends on surfactant

M. smegmatis uses new types of biofilm to enclose a liquid core and expand outwards in a weird new way.

Mycobacterium smegmatis Expands Across Surfaces by Hydraulic Sliding - Environmental Microbiology Reports enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... - Our new paper is out!

These Techniques Stopped the Outbreak of an Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in a SoCal Hospital | Newswise Researchers detected Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common hospital-acquired bacterium, often found in moist environments. But this strain carried a gene called New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase (NDM-1), an en...

UCLA Health ended an NDM-1 Pseudomonas aeruginosa outbreak by tracing it to an ICU sink biofilm via whole-genome sequencing, then eliminating it with targeted disinfection, plumbing changes, and staff education—showcasing the power of diverse IPC measures.

#AMR

www.newswise.com/articles/the...

‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method PARIS—In an effort to modernize the principles and empirical procedures of examining phenomena and advancing humanity’s collective knowledge, the International Council for Science announced Thursday t...

‘Seek Funding’ Step Added To Scientific Method

The image is a modern print-out with hand-applied yellow highlights of a page of a medical journal published in 1961, announcing in a letter the first observation of bacteria containing resistance to the brand-new drug celbenin, later known as methicillin — a drug that was supposed to solve the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance. Oops.

Woke last night to the sound of thunder. How far off, I sat and wondered.

(First published notice of the superbug that would come to be known as MRSA, 1961.)

Proteomic characterization of Aspergillus fumigatus – host interactions using the ex-vivo pig lung (EVPL) model Aspergillus fumigatus is an opportunistic fungal pathogen of the human airway that can cause a variety of chronic infections, typically in the context of pre-existing lung damage. The interaction o...

Delighted to share our latest publication from @medmycology.bsky.social adapting the EVPL model to study A. fumigatus virulence, made possible through collaboration with @friendlymicrobe.bsky.social. Many thanks to @researchireland.ie for funding this work

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Optimizing synthetic cystic fibrosis sputum media for growth of non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae Non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is an early pathogen isolated from the lungs of children with cystic fibrosis (CF). However, its role in the progression of CF lung infection is poorly under...

Paper! @phoebesilva.bsky.social's labour of love* optimising synthetic #CysticFibrosis mucus for growth of NTHi is out #MicroSky #Biofilm www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

*more like seething resentment as the bugs steadfastly refused to grow in most things we threw at them ^_^

The general trend is crazy. Here is Twitter vs Bluesky volumes for the last week. On some days they are equal in volume.

R-pyocins as targeted antimicrobials against Pseudomonas aeruginosa - npj Antimicrobials and Resistance npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - R-pyocins as targeted antimicrobials against Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Delighted to be able to share our new review on R-pyocins produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It covers genetics, regulation, killing mechanisms and therapeutic potential amongst other things. #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s44...

📣 New collaborative work on invasive Strep A epidemiology. A synchronous rise in cases caused by a previously rare emm type 3.93. Genomic analysis identifies a genomic rearrangement in isolates associated to the surge. Added value of long-read seq! Thanks to all! wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/...

Horizontal gene transfer of the functional archaellum machinery to Bacteria Motility in Archaea is driven by a nanomachinery called the archaellum. So far, archaella have been exclusively described for the archaeal domain; however, a recent study reported the presence of arch...

Would you expect that Bacteria use an archaellum for swimming? We didn't, but we found that some Chloroflexota do! Find the story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A little thread below 1/n

Maximum intensity projection of a live embryonic zebrafish heart at 72 hours post fertilisation, showing myocardial actin (green; Tg(myl7:LifeActGFP)) and endothelial actin (magenta; Tg(fli1a:Ac-TagRFP)). The image is overlaid in the atrium with 3D reconstructions of the myocardial (light blue), endocardial (pink) and extracellular matrix (orange), and in the ventricle with a 3D reconstruction of the myocardium colour-coded to visualise myocardial thickness.

Tools to analyze early heart morphogenesis in detail are limited. @noelresearchlab.bsky.social &co develop computational package called morphoHeart that allows for integrated 3D analysis of both #heart & extracellular matrix morphology in live #zebrafish embryos 🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/42DlqtJ

Unveiling the ghost: machine learning’s impact on the landscape of virology The complexity and speed of evolution in viruses with RNA genomes makes predictive identification of variants with epidemic or pandemic potential challenging. In recent years, machine learning has bec...

Setting up an account to talk about my review article in @microbiologysociety.org - all about how #AI has been applied to virus research!

#machinelearning #virology

doi.org/10.1099/jgv....

You missed our series about unnoticed, but influential female scientists in microbiology that were honoured by naming a bacterium after them?
Here is the basic information about the 26 women and their groundbreaking work 👉 www.dsmz.de/collection/honouring-women-in-science

#herstory #WomenInScience

I’m excited to share the first results of my PhD research, now available as a preprint! We investigated if a reductionist model of phage steering could effectively target P. aeruginosa despite the additional selective pressure of competition with S. aureus.

Artistic interpetation of a fluorescently tagged comet... Happy to talk to people about the S. aureus comet motility assay, if they need help with it etc

S. aureus organises itself differently in motile comet tips and can go uphill!

Staphylococcus aureus gliding comets: formation and observation - new observations of the S. aureus comets and how to get the assay to work www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Staphylococcus aureus gliding comets: formation and observation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.17.628996v1