Best of the blog

This summer, the Society’s blog, Microbe Post (microbepost.org), celebrated its first birthday and it continues to go from strength to strength. This is a review of some of the great stories we’ve published over the past few months.

If you're sending a probe to another planet, how can you ensure that there are no microbes hitching a lift? In 'NASA, the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, and the extremotolerant bacteria' I interviewed Dr Parag Vaishampayan, who studies the microbes that live in the clean rooms where spacecraft are built. Parag’s work is both interesting and surprising and well worth a read.

On a sunny day in August, I laced up my walking boots and hiked around a small island on Loch Lomond with Caroline Millins, a PhD student from the University of Glasgow, for the August edition of our podcast, Microbe Talk. Why were we there? To search for ticks and learn about Lyme disease prevalence in Scotland.

Each month, we roundup a few of the newly detailed species of microbes in our New to science series. September had a food theme and I learnt all about new species isolated from donkey milk powder, cream cheese, kimchi and raw chicken.

Before his talk at our Autumn Conference, I spoke to Dr Stefan Raunser about his work on a new class of bacterial toxin in ‘The shapeshifting, self-injecting bacterial syringe'. It’s a great story, involving a three-way bacteria–nematode–insect parasitic relationship and a protein that looks like a vuvuzela.

During the conference I got to interview Professor Ted White for Microbe Talk Extra. He told me about the state of drug development to treat fungal diseases and a great many fungal facts. Did you know that every time you inhale you’re breathing in 100 spores of Aspergillus? You do now!

I’m always on the lookout for new stories for the blog and the podcast – if you hear of anything that might be suitable, drop me a line at: [email protected]

Benjamin Thompson

Senior Public Relations Officer, SGM