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HPC vaccine shows early promise Posted by paustian on Jun 20, 2011 - 11:34 AM A study of pap smears by Julia Brotherton and Dorota Gertig (among others) has shown that the HPV vaccine is decreasing the occurrence of precancerous cells in young women. In contrast to other vaccines, where the benefit is immediately observable, since HPV causes gential warts and years later potentially cervical cancer, it was thought it would be up to a decade before a discernible effect was seen. This study was undertaken 3 years after the HPV vaccine became widespread in Australia in girls 12 to 26 and has shown a halving of the rate of high-grade abnormalities in pap smears. Encouraging news, but more data will be needed before a definitive conclusion can be reached. Filed under | Articles | Chapter 19 Viral Pathogens Printer-friendly page A new treatment for HUS complications from hemorrhagic E. coli Posted by paustian on Jun 01, 2011 - 09:09 AM Hemorrhagic E. coli causes a nasty gastrointestinal infection that afflicts at least 73,000 patients yearly in the United States. During a recent outbreak of the illness in Germany, doctor Franz Schaefer reported successfully treating a patient with eculizumab, a drug that inhibits the complement system. Recent research suggests that the complement system may be involved in Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, and inhibition of complement could possibly prevent death from HUS. A young girl suffering from HUS, was treated with eculizumab and showed marked improvement in 24 hours. If this turns out to be true, it would be a *#*$ big deal (as our Vice President likes to say) as HUS is a major cause of death in hemorrhagic E. coli infections. Filed under | Articles | Chapter 17 Bacterial Pathogen Printer-friendly page University of Wisconsin-Madison achieves its energy goals Posted by paustian on Jan 20, 2011 - 11:37 AM My place of employment just announced that they have not only accomplished, but exceeded their goal of decreasing energy usage on campus by 20%. The final number was a 25% reduction in energy use. When this goal was announced in 2006, many were skeptical, since the campus had just gone through an energy upgrade, capturing all the easy fixes (changing light bulbs, lighting usage and removing low-efficiency motors). The main savings came from aggressively pursuing heating and cooling issues and further lighting upgrades in buildings and parking ramps. The cost of the program was 40 million dollars and the UW should recover that cost in energy savings within 5 years. Go Badgers. Filed under | General Interest Printer-friendly page Through the Microscope, now an eBook Posted by paustian on Dec 06, 2010 - 08:28 PM Through the Microscope is now available as an eBook on any reader that can handle Adobe Digital Editions ebooks. This includes the iPod and iPad if you download the free Bluefire reader. Textbook consortia yet again shows that the little guys can beat the big guys to market. The eBook costs $30.00 and includes a subscription to the website. You can get the book at Lulu's website Filed under | Textbook news Printer-friendly page Arsenic using bacteria Posted by paustian on Dec 03, 2010 - 08:56 AM Felisa Wolfe-Simon at the U.S. Geological Survey had an idea. Arsenic (As) is just below phosphorus (P) in the periodic table, and due to the way electrons buzz around in its orbitals, it has many of the same properties. It is just a little bit heavier. As might serve as a stand-in for P in living systems, especially in places where P concentrations are low and As is abundant. Understandably, scientists were skeptical. While As does share many properties with P, it is not as stable in water. It did not seem possible that living systems could put up with this greater instability. Dr. Wolfe-Simon set out to find microbes that were As users, starting with isolates from Mono Lake. Mono Lake is a hypersaline lake with high As concentrations, where the water leaves only by evaporation. An enrichment medium was set up containing glucose as a carbon source, vitamins, trace metals, no P, and the addition of As. She then inoculated a sample of sediment from this lake and demanded the cells grow without phosphate. Something grew! The microbe was transferred to fresh medium multiple times to make sure it was not just using stored P, yet it continued to prosper. Extensive analysis was performed and many of the experiments suggest that the arsenate is indeed incorporated into macromolecules. More analysis needs to be performed, but it appears this microbe is substituting As for one of the six major elements of life. This flies in the face of current dogma and will certainly need to be investigated further. Filed under | Articles | Chapter 23 Bacterial Diversity Printer-friendly page Creating self-study quizzes Posted by paustian on Oct 29, 2010 - 10:49 AM A new functionality has just been added to the microbiology textbook. You can now create self-study quizzes to test your comprehension of the material. To create the quiz, go to the Quiz Creation Page and choose the chapters and number of questions that you want from each chapter. When finished, hit the Create Quiz button. The next page will have a quiz created from the extensive quiz test bank of the book, with the questions focusing on the material you asked for. Answer the questions and when finished, click the Grade Quiz button. The quiz will be graded and you will be taken to a page that shows your score, how you answered each question, the correct answer for each question and explanations. This is open to anyone who wants to use it, so test it out. Filed under | News | Textbook news Printer-friendly page Industrial Biofuels Production is Moving Forward Posted by paustian on Sep 21, 2010 - 01:31 PM Today the majority of biofuel production is made from corn products using yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to ferment the hexose sugars to ethanol. This is not an optimal method, as corn is expensive to grow, and using it for biofuels competes with a major food source! Alternative sugars and source materials are needed. Almost all plant waste, the non-food part, contain pentose sugars such as xylose and arabinose. Engineering a yeast that could utilize these sugars would be an important step forward. Sanchez and coworkers report in Biotechnology for Biofuels about the creation of a yeast strain that is capable of utilizing pentoses to make ethanol. Interestingly, the approach used a combination of standard genetic engineering to clones xylose and arabinose utilizing genes into the yeast, and then what they call evolutionary engineering. This is basically setting up a contest and picking out the fastest growing strain. It is analogous to what our ancestors did with food crops by picking the best seeds to save for next years planting. In this case the candidate yeast strain was grown in a continuous culture (with xylose and arabinose as carbon sources) and slowly turning up the feed rate. This creates a powerful selective pressure and only the fastest growing strains can stay in the culture. These kinds of experiments may eventually lead to viable biofuel production technologies. Printer-friendly page Glossary functions, now with more power Posted by paustian on Sep 04, 2010 - 04:15 PM New features for the textbook have been added over the last month. The back end code that creates glossary entries have been completely redone. Pages from the textbook now load much faster and the authors or administrators can define new words, whose definitions automatically become available to the entire textbook. If you mouse over highlighted words (that appear green like this) a popup glossary entry will be shown to you. This joins other nice features of the textbook including... A search function The ability to highlight text and then call it back during study time. Concept quizzes that test your comprehension of material you just read. Animations and videos that bring microbiology alive. To make the best use of the textbook, don't treat it as you would a conventional hardcover book. Take advantage of the web sites many features. Printer-friendly page Another battle begins in the war against archaic publishers Posted by paustian on Jul 13, 2010 - 07:26 PM This website and its accompany book at lulu is a small shot across the bow of the publishing houses that charge ridiculous fees for student textbooks. A similar and related battle is brewing in the journal publishing racket. Nature is proposing a more than 400% increase in the subscription fee they charge the University of California. And we are not talking chump change. The current fee is $4,465 and Nature wants to raise its feel to $17,479 per journal. That amounts to over $1 million dollars a year in subscription fees for the campus. Filed under | Articles Read more about Another battle begins in the war against archaic publishers Printer-friendly page Subscription processing has been automated. Posted by paustian on Jun 09, 2010 - 09:51 AM Subscription processing from PayPal used to involve manual authorization of each user by staff at Textbook Consortia. As of May 2010, a robust implementation of the instant payment notification system has been installed. With this new system, the potential subscriber clicks on the PayPal button and fills out a simple form for payment. Once payment is verified, PayPal sends a notification back to the Through the Microscope site and the subscriber is granted access. Authorization should take just a few minutes. As always, if you are having trouble, contact Textbook Consortia using the contact form.   Post Comment