Meanwhile in China

Principles of Molecular Virology: US | UK

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Is this a 5 minute argument or the full half hour?

An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.
A: No it isn’t!

If you like a good argument, you’ll love Debatepedia, the place where you can go to argue debate issues such as:

• Creationism vs evolution in schools
• DDT in the Developing World
• Cheaper AIDS drugs for developing countries
• Animal Experimentation
• DNA Databases for Criminals
• Stem Cell Research or Therapeutic Cloning

and lots more. Have fun!

Workshop on innate anti-viral immunity and virus evasion strategies

Opening Doors - Scientific Workshops for Young Researchers
An initiative aimed at promoting links between young scientists from the UK and Spain
Workshop on innate anti-viral immunity and virus evasion strategies
Sigenza (Guadalajara) 17 21 February 2008

The British Council in Spain in collaboration with the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) is organising a series of scientific seminars to provide opportunities for young researchers from the UK and Spain to meet face-to-face for the exchange of ideas, knowledge and information on priority topics and to explore future areas of research and collaboration. The next seminar of this series will take place in the Parador de Sigenza (Guadalajara), Spain, from 17th to 21st February 2008. The meeting will involve ample opportunities for discussion in structured and informal sessions with keynote speakers and young researchers. Keynote speakers will give 30 min talks and participants will give a 15 min presentation of their work.

We are starting to understand at the molecular level the battle between viruses and the host defence systems, and it is becoming evident that the initial virus-cell interaction and the activation of innate immunity are critical to control viral diseases. The Meeting will discuss the initial molecular events occurring upon infection that may restrict virus replication, and will include intracellular signalling, the interferon system, cytokine networks, natural killer cells and other innate immunity pathways. Viral evasion strategies to counteract the host anti-viral responses will also be considered. Viral systems will include emerging viruses, human pathogens and virus-host models that are providing insights into mechanisms of viral pathogenesis.

Keynote speakers:

Richard Randall (University of St. Andrews) Modulation of interferon by paramyxovirus
Gavin Wilkinson (Cardiff University) Human cytomegalovirus evasion of natural killer cells
Greg Towers (University College London) Cellular factors restricting the replication of retroviruses
John Sinclair (University of Cambridge) Factors controlling human cytomegalovirus replication
Richard Elliot (University of St. Andrews) Immune evasion by viruses causing hemorragic diseases
Adolfo Garca Sastre (Mount Sinai School of Medicine) Pathogenesis of Spanish flu
Luis Enjuanes (Centro Nacional de Biotecnologa) Pathogenesis of SARS coronavirus
Jos Alcami (Instituto de Salud Carlos III) Factors controlling HIV infection of immune cells
Amelia Nieto (Centro Nacional de Biotecnologa) Interaction of influenza virus with cell factors
Antonio Alcami (Centro de Biologa Molecular) Chemokine modulation by poxvirus and herpesvirus

The seminar is limited to about 30 participants and participation is by invitation. The organisers of this scientific workshop will cover participants travel and full board accommodation costs. Early to mid career researchers wishing to participate should send their CV and the attached application form to belen.fortea@britishcouncil.es before 30th November 2007.
Further details: Antonio Alcami (aalcami@cbm.uam.es) or Richard Randall (rer@st-and.ac.uk)

Health Risk Behaviors on MySpace

It’s not very often I can write a post which is suitable for both Microbiologybytes and Science of the Invisible, but this topic is. MySpace is a popular social networking site where users create individual profiles. A group from the University of Washington examined publicly available MySpace profiles of 16- and 17-year-olds and determined the prevalence of personal risk behavior descriptions and identifiable information. They looked at 142 publicly available MySpace profiles (so not a particularly big study) from the class of 2008 MySpace group. 47% contained indications of risk behavior information: 21% described sexual activity; 25% alcohol use; 9% cigarette use; and 6% drug use.

So are these results surprising?
Not to me. Considering this is a small sample of a self-selecting group who have public MySpace profiles, I’m slightly surprised that the percentages of risk behavior are not higher. Of course this study is flawed in lots of ways, but perhaps the most interesting sentence in the paper is:

Social networking sites may provide a new venue for identification, assessment, and interventions to prevent or reduce health risks.

Watch out teenagers, the health police are after you!

What Are Adolescents Showing the World About Their Health Risk Behaviors on MySpace?
Medscape General Medicine 2007 9: 9 (requires free registration)

It’s hard to beat 100%

The results of the 2007 UK National Student Survey are out, and once again they show that the University of Leicester is the most satisfying place to study for a degree in Biology. It’s hard to beat a 100% satisfaction score:

We also ranked first for personal development:

Overall, the University of Leicester emerged as the top university in the midlands in terms of student satisfaction for the second successive year. So if you’re considering applying for a biology (including microbiology) degree, why not talk to us.

SGM Autumn Meeting 2007

SGM Autumn Meeting, University of Edinburgh, 3-6 September 2007

Monday 3 & Tuesday 4 September 2007. Plenary: Food, fluids, fingers, faeces and flies - food- and water-borne pathogens
Hot topic symposium with support from the Natural Environment Research Council, Wednesday 5 & Thursday 6 September 2007: Post-genomic analysis of microbial function in the environment
Cells & Cell Surfaces Group / Microbial Infection Group joint symposium, Wednesday 5 & Thursday 6 September 2007: Mechanisms of diarrhoeal disease
Cells & Cell Surfaces Group - Microbial Infection Group - Clinical Microbiology Group/Society for Anaerobic Microbiology joint symposium, Wednesday 5 & Thursday 6 September 2007: Anaerobe 2007 - Changing perceptions and patterns of anaerobic infection
Education & Training Group Thursday 6 September 2007: Getting it right: risk assessment and recording in microbiology
Environmental Microbiology Group/Virus Ecology Group joint symposium, Monday 3 & Tuesday 4 September 2007: Ecology of viruses
Eukaryotic Microbiology Group, Wednesday 5 & Thursday 6 September 2007: Eukaryotic microbial pathogens, attack and counter attack
Fermentation & Bioprocessing Group symposium, Tuesday 4 September 2007: Monitoring bioprocesses
Food & Beverages Group/Systematics & Evolution Group joint workshop, Wednesday 5 September 2007: Workshop on Molecular detection of food and water pathogens
Food & Beverages Group - Systematics & Evolution Group - Physiology, Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics Group symposium, Monday 3 & Tuesday 4 September 2007: The physiology of non-growing microbes
Plus:
Fred Griffith Review Lecture - Professor Richard Moxon (University of Oxford): Bacterial variation, virulence and vaccines
Peter Wildy Prize for Microbiology Education - Professor Simon Cutting (University of London): Ten years in Vietnam
Young microbiologist of the year competition

MicrobiologyBytes is the number one microbiology blog (according to Google)

According to Google, MicrobiologyBytes is the number one microbiology blog:

Thank you to the thousands of readers who made this possible. But let’s not stop there. Tell me which microbiology topics you’re most interested in, and let’s keep making MicrobiologyBytes better!

Microbiology Practical Class

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a student stydying microbiology at university? Timothy Leung’s great video gives you a pretty good idea (nice streaking technique guys!):

Link from César.

Guest Post: Plus ça change, plus c’est … le same Web, only better?

MicrobiologyBytes is delighted to welcome our first guest blogger:

Ed Rybicki, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

My, how things do change… I found myself reflecting, while I was looking over the detritus on our Web server of some 13 years of posting pages on the Web. “Orphan” pages, unconnected to anything current; pages with a majority of dead links, because they are so old; pages last updated in 2000; pages left behind by the inexorable onward flow of the river that is the www; pages carried forward through several incarnations of the server… And yet, not to be deleted by the careless press of a key, because there is a sort of history there that is very hard to chronicle. A history of how the Kikwit Ebola outbreak unfolded, for example, post by email post. An account of how an Honours student inadvertently became the Web’s only Ebola expert, for a brief while in 1995… ah, what passing pleasures, now mainly gone.

Consider this: a connected set of Web pages is a network, existing as a linked series of snapshots that reflect the current update. Every single change alters the network - yet where is this recorded? If you are lucky and have a hard drive the size of the Empire State Building, or if you are disciplined enough to actually back things up as successive versions, then perhaps you have an accurate historical record of how things changed - but no-one else will. And given the fact that most normal people are not disciplined enough to do the necessary, you probably don’t either…

So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of web-published material? We are confronted with a situation not dissimilar to the one which confronts would-be chroniclers of any ordinary human life: the only material available for research is the latest version (if still extant), and a mess of isolated snapshots and pages, if we are lucky.

I took a look back over my teaching material the other day, which I started formulating back in mid-1994, round about the time the Web came into existence for us non-professionals. I don’t have a single file dating back to that time, not one: the only thing left is a grandfathered filename (virtut1.html) that it would be too complicated to change. The earliest I can get back to - on a dusty CD-ROM backup unearthed from a bottom drawer, from a PC I gave away at least three upgrades ago - is 1998, and then only for some of the files I actually updated at the time. My first web pages are thus irretrievably gone, vanished into entropy - unless they are fossilised on some long-lived legal or illegal mirror server somewhere, like some of my outdated pages I found quite by accident on a computer in Cambridge, and only got removed by threat of copyright infringement action.

So why bother at all? Of what interest is the history of some half-baked, amateurish attempts at porting teaching material from overhead projection transparencies to the web?

Weelll… it’s not really for me to say, is it? I can’t predict who might be interested in the historiography of virology pedagogics - but it’s just a little sad to think that so much work has vanished into free electrons, wandering the universe until the inevitable heat death stills them all. I mean, look at Alan Cann: his Virology textbook is now in a fourth edition, and all three are available to anyone who wishes to compare them. I can’t even find Versions 1 - n-1 of my material, so all you’re left with is Version n, of 2007 (© Ed Rybicki). It’s paradoxical that in this electronic age, it’s still the traditional medium of print that still has the best potential for survival. I may even still have some of my original hand-printed overheads from 1981, if they survived the last office-cleaning purge!

But be that as it may…my continuous rolling upgrade of the Web pages has reached a 2006 version in most cases, and 2007 in a few - with a lot of visual material still stuck in a dark age. There is actually not that much incentive to do too much about that, frankly, given the wealth of graphics now out there in Webspace: Russell Kightley, for example, has a wealth of thoroughly professional-looking pictures of viruses, cells, and virus life cycles; I use movies of the HIV life cycle filched from Boehringer-Ingelheim’s site (as well as from Alan Cann); there are now some truly stunning cryo-EM 3D image reconstructions of virus particles available…and nearly everything is copyrighted, so putting it up on my site could be courting prosecution. Which is why linking to things via the web is the way to go…if I only had time! Aaaaarrrgghhh!!

Which is why I am impressed by this site: unlike some of us early adopters who are now hopelessly behind, he has aggressively taken on the new medium and is making it work. More power to him - this is one of the best sites I know of for current microbiology education, let alone education about viruses, and long may it live. With no orphan pages; no lost links… and a daily backup, so that a complete history is available to some future webnaut, somewhere out there. Rock on.

If you would like to be a guest blogger on MicrobiologyBytes, click the Guests tab above.

UCLA Undergraduate Genomics Research Initiative (UGRI)

The UCLA Undergraduate Genomics Research Initiative (UGRI) is an initiative where students learn about cutting-edge research in genomic biology and biotechnology by experiencing it. The UGRI is not a course; it’s a collaboration. Students in different undergraduate courses - from science general education to upper division life sciences - participate and learn while building a major research accomplishment: the sequencing of the genome of the bacterium Ammonifex degensii.