Editors in Conversation
128 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★ - 10 ratingsEditors in Conversation is the official podcast of the American Society for Microbiology Journals. Editors in Conversation features discussions between ASM Journals Editors, researchers and clinicians working on the most cutting edge issues in the microbial sciences. Topics include laboratory diagnosis and clinical treatment of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, epidemiology of infections, multidrug-resistant organisms, pharmacology of antimicrobial agents, susceptibility testing, and more.
The podcast is directed to microbiologists, infectious diseases clinicians, pharmacists and basic, clinical and translational researchers interested in the microbial sciences. A particular emphasis is on basic, epidemiological and pharmacological aspects of infectious diseases, including antimicrobial resistance and therapeutics.
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Episodes
Detection of carbapenemases (JCM ed.)
August 21, 2020 17:32 - 44 minutes - 31 MB• How can the clinical laboratory detect carbapenemases, which are enzyme that can make bacteria resistant to some of the most potent or broad-spectrum antibiotics available? • What is the clinical significance of detecting such an enzyme? Does it affect the care of the patient? • Finally, what practical advice can we give to help labs decide which of the many available tests is the best one for them? The antibiotics we discuss are the “carbapenems,” such as imipenem and meropenem. Thes...
New Vancomycin Guidelines (AAC Journal)
August 13, 2020 22:02 - 43 minutes - 30.2 MBDiscussing new guidelines on the use of vancomycin for severe Staphylocccus aureus infections. The August issue of AAC includes interesting papers about mechanism of resistance to metronidazole in C. difficile, a variant of KPC resistant to ceftazidime-avibactam and description of a new “ultra-broad spectrum B-lactamase inhibitor” among others! You can find the issue at https://aac.asm.org.
New Vancomycin Guidelines (AAC ed.)
August 13, 2020 22:02 - 43 minutes - 30.2 MBDiscussing new guidelines on the use of vancomycin for severe Staphylocccus aureus infections. The August issue of AAC includes interesting papers about mechanism of resistance to metronidazole in C. difficile, a variant of KPC resistant to ceftazidime-avibactam and description of a new “ultra-broad spectrum B-lactamase inhibitor” among others! You can find the issue at https://aac.asm.org.
COViD-19: Therapeutic Update (AAC ed.)
August 10, 2020 22:30 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MBThe state of the art treatment of COVID-19, understand the role of some medications currently used for COVID-19 and dissecting novel approaches and strategies for the treatment of COVID-19 likely to become available in the short term. Guests: Henry Masur MD and Adarsh Bhimraj MD. Read the current issue of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy at https://aac.asm.org
COViD-19: Therapeutic Update (AAC Journal)
August 10, 2020 22:30 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MBThe state of the art treatment of COVID-19, understand the role of some medications currently used for COVID-19 and dissecting novel approaches and strategies for the treatment of COVID-19 likely to become available in the short term. Guests: Henry Masur MD and Adarsh Bhimraj MD. Read the current issue of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy at https://aac.asm.org
Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Journal - Past, Present and Future (AAC ed.)
August 10, 2020 21:22 - 33 minutes - 23.1 MBA conversation with Lou Rice about his career and his experience of being the Editor of Chief for the AAC Journal for the past decade. Visit aac.asm.org to read the current issue.
Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Journal - Past, Present and Future
August 10, 2020 21:22 - 33 minutes - 23.1 MBA conversation with Lou Rice about his career and his experience of being the Editor of Chief for the AAC Journal for the past decade. Visit aac.asm.org to read the current issue.
Diagnostic Tests for COVID-19 (JCM Journal)
August 05, 2020 04:05 - 39 minutes - 27.5 MBA discussion about laboratory testing for COVID-19 with two experts, Dr. Melissa Miller and Dr. Elitza Theel. Hosted by Journal of Clinical Microbiology Editor in Chief, Dr. Alexander McAdam. Get the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology at https://jcm.asm.org/
Diagnostic Tests for COVID-19 (JCM ed.)
August 05, 2020 04:05 - 39 minutes - 27.5 MBA discussion about laboratory testing for COVID-19 with two experts, Dr. Melissa Miller and Dr. Elitza Theel. Hosted by Journal of Clinical Microbiology Editor in Chief, Dr. Alexander McAdam. Get the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology at https://jcm.asm.org/
Therapeutic approaches for COVID-19: Myths and facts (AAC Journal)
August 04, 2020 19:40 - 31 minutes - 21.5 MBObjectives: • Discuss the therapeutic options currently being used for COVID-19 • Evaluate some clinical data supporting the use of these drugs • Comment on clinical trials and enrollment Participants: • Andre Kalil, Professor, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NB, USA. Lead Investigator, NIH Clinical Trial for COVId-19 • Miguel A. Martinez, Editor AAC. Professor, AIDS Research Institute-IrsiCaixa, Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, Barcelona, Spain. Visit http...
Therapeutic approaches for COVID-19: Myths and facts (AAC ed.)
August 04, 2020 19:40 - 31 minutes - 21.5 MBObjectives: • Discuss the therapeutic options currently being used for COVID-19 • Evaluate some clinical data supporting the use of these drugs • Comment on clinical trials and enrollment Participants: • Andre Kalil, Professor, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NB, USA. Lead Investigator, NIH Clinical Trial for COVId-19 • Miguel A. Martinez, Editor AAC. Professor, AIDS Research Institute-IrsiCaixa, Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol, Barcelona, Spain. Visit http...
MMP #17: How bacteria can change graphene to propel rotors.
October 13, 2016 23:22 - 48 minutes - 33.2 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Julia Yeomans and Vikas Berry. Julia Yeomans of Oxford University in the United Kingdom and chemical engineer Vikas Berry of the University of Illinois, Chicago, talk with Jeff Fox about their separate, but in some ways similar, research efforts in which they use bacteria to perturb and probe the physical properties of simple machines, in one case, and unusual materials, in the other. Yeomans and her collaborators are developing models of miniature wi...
MMP #16: Insights into Toxoplasma gondii parasites
September 15, 2016 00:06 - 37 minutes - 26 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guest, Emma Wilson. Emma H. Wilson of the University of California, Riverside, talks with Jeff Fox about efforts, with her collaborators to determine more precisely how Toxoplasma gondii parasites disrupt the mammalian brain—in this case, the brains of mice. This same parasite infects about one-third of the human population, but is held in check by the immune system unless those host defense mechanisms become impaired. Wilson and her collaborators find that th...
MMP015: A Scientific Roadmap for Antibiotic Discovery
August 24, 2016 00:17 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Carolyn Shore and Ruben Tommasi. Carolyn Shore of Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., and Ruben Tommasi of Entasis Therapeutics in Waltham, Massachusetts, talk with Jeff Fox about what’s needed to identify and develop new antimicrobial agents to treat infections caused by bacterial pathogens, with an emphasis on gram-negative bacterial pathogens. According to that recent report from Pew Charitable Trust, which is based in Philadelphia, the chal...
MMP014: A look at several microorganisms involved with electricity.
June 29, 2016 23:44 - 44 minutes - 30.9 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Gemma Reguera and Geoffrey Gadd. Gemma Reguera of Michigan State University in East Lansing and Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee in Scotland talk with Jeff Fox about their efforts, to probe some of the electrical properties of materials produced naturally by specific microorganisms. Thus, Geobacter bacteria make protein filaments, called pili, that act as nanowires, transporting 1 billion electrons per second, according to Reguera and her collab...
MMP013: Redetermining the ratio of microbial to human cells – correcting the widely held view that this ratio is 10 to 1
June 01, 2016 22:13 - 42 minutes - 29 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Ron Milo and Shai Fuchs. Ron Milo of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, talk with Jeff Fox about their efforts, with Ron Sender at Weizmann, to redetermine the ratio of microbial to human cells. This ratio, widely cited as being 10 to 1, is closer to even, they find, while arguing that it may prove helpful in the long run to have a better and more rigorous grasp of how ma...
MMP012: Hydrogen from ground rocks can furnish microbial ecosystems with energy to drive growth.
April 27, 2016 22:28 - 43 minutes - 30 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guest, Jon Telling. Jon Telling of Bristol University in Bristol, United Kingdom talks with Jeff Fox about his findings suggesting that the grinding of glaciers over rocks can liberate hydrogen, which, in turn, drives the growth of methanogens within microbial ecosystems. Telling and his collaborators provide evidence that the grinding of rocks beneath glaciers can free hydrogen gas from minerals in those rocks. In turn, that hydrogen provides energy to furnis...
MMP011: Reexamining the emergence of land plants based on an analysis of the cell walls of charophycean green algae.
April 08, 2016 22:45 - 44 minutes - 30.9 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Øjvind Moestrup, Peter Ulvskov, and Jesper Harholt. Øjvind Moestrup and Peter Ulvskov, both at the University of Copenhagen and Jesper Harholt at Carlsberg Laboratory, also in Copenhagen, Denmark, talk with Jeff Fox about their hypothesis about terrestrial plants, based on analyses of the cell walls of charophycean green algae. Moestrup, Peter Ulvskov, and Jesper Harholt thought that something was amiss with our current understanding of the evolutionary ...
MMP010: Examining the gut microbiota of American Indians of Cheyenne and Arapaho ancestry with Cecil M. Lewis, Jr. and Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan.
March 02, 2016 01:07 - 43 minutes - 30.1 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guests, Cecil M. Lewis, Jr. and Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan. Lewis and Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan—“Krithi”-- both from the University of Oklahoma in Norman talk with Jeff Fox about their analyses of the gut microbiomes of American Indians of Cheyenne and Arapaho ancestry. Lewis, Krithi, and their collaborators learned that the gut microbial taxonomic profiles of these Native Americans are characterized by a reduced abundance of anti-inflammatory bacteria and ...
MMP009: Customizing phage by swapping tail genes to target specific pathogens with Timothy Lu.
February 02, 2016 21:54 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guest, Timothy Lu. Lu, an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, talks with Jeff Fox about efforts to develop new phage varieties, swapping in phage tail genes that enable them to target specific bacterial pathogens, including those carrying virulence or antibiotic resistance factors. Lu and other members of the MIT team worked with T7 p...
MMP008: Producing yeast strains for making lager beers with new flavor notes with Stijn Mertens.
January 06, 2016 21:25 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MBHost: Jeff Fox with special guest, Stijn Mertens. Mertens, a graduate student working with Kevin Verstrepen at the University of Leuven in Belgium, talks with Jeff Fox about their efforts to develop new yeast strains for making lager beers—imparting novel flavor and aroma notes without detracting from the freshness and drinkability of lagers. Unlike other beers, lagers are brewed at low temperatures and with two special hybrid versions of yeast that date back about 600 years. Those hybrids...
MMP007: A virtual robot with its own virtual microbiome telling it what to do with Warren C. Ruder
December 08, 2015 22:15 - 46 minutes - 32.1 MBWarren C. Ruder of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia talks with Jeff Fox about efforts to develop an electronic model system that incorporates a robot for a host and two slightly different kinds of simulated bacteria for its microbiome. The model carries an engineered bacterial population onboard to stand in for the microbiome, while the robot serves as a proxy for an animal host. When conditions are changed a bit, and the robot is m...
MMP006: A fused, single-subunit bacterial ribosome with Alexander Mankin and Michael Jewett
November 05, 2015 23:04 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBAlexander Mankin –called Shura --of the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Michael Jewett at Northwestern University talk with Jeff Fox about their recent success in joining the 30S and 50S bacterial ribosomal subunits into a single, functioning entity and the implications of that work in terms of making specialized proteins and for studying antibiotics that target the ribosome. This story was featured in the October 2015 issue of Microbe magazine. Visit microbeworld.org/mmp for more.
MMP005: Fruitflies, microbes, and aggression with Jeremy Brownlie
October 02, 2015 22:42 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MBJeremy Brownlie of Griffıth University in Brisbane, Australia, talks with Jeff Fox about how bacteria influence aggressive behavior in an animal. Fruit flies infected with the wMelPop strain of Wolbachia were less aggressive than their uninfected peers. The neurotransmitter octopamine regulates fruit fly aggression, and Brownlie and his collaborators found that the infected flies produce less of the compound than their uninfected peers, and expression of two genes that encode enzymes respons...
MMP004: Deep-Sea Archaea and the Tree of Life with Thijs Ettema
September 08, 2015 17:09 - 38 minutes - 26.3 MBThijs Ettema of Uppsala University in Sweden talks with Jeff Fox about a deep-sea archaeon, named Lokiarchaeum for the underwater volcano between Greenland and Norway near where it was found, that might be related to the last common ancestor of eukaryotes. “The shape-shifting deity ‘Loki’ is described as complex and confusing; thus, ‘Lokiarchaeum’ seems a very appropriate name for our typical prokaryote with a whole bunch of eukaryotic genes,” he says. “Importantly, the genes we found in Lo...
MMP003: Smallpox and the Native Americans with Paul Kelton
July 29, 2015 22:03 - 42 minutes - 29 MBPaul Kelton of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, talks with Jeff Fox about the introduction of infectious diseases among Native American populations. Kelton’s book Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: an Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824, published in April 2015 by the University of Oklahoma Press, looks at how Native American communities responded to new diseases, including establishing quarantines, to protect themselves against smallpox and other diseases. He offers ev...
MMP002: Ultrasmall bacteria with Birgit Luef and Chris Brown
July 29, 2015 21:58 - 54 minutes - 37.4 MBBirgit Luef of Trondheim University in Norway and Chris Brown of the University of California, Berkeley, talk with Jeff Fox about ultrasmall bacteria. Birgit Luef and Chris Brown of Jill Banfield’s lab at UC Berkeley went looking for bacteria with small genomes. They found large numbers of organisms that not only had small genomes but also were extremely small in size—small enough to pass through a 0.2-micrometer filter, with many in the 250-nanometer range. Such ultrasmall bacteria are ...
MMP001: Polio Virus Vesicles with Nihal Altan-Bonnet
July 29, 2015 21:53 - 49 minutes - 34.3 MBAlthough virologists long assumed that lone viruses independently infect target cells, in the case of poliovirus and other enteroviruses, several viral particles can cluster within lipid vesicles—from which they collectively enter target cells, improving overall infectivity and yields, the NIH researchers report. Nihal Altan-Bonnet at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., and her collaborators focused on poliovirus, a particu...