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TWiV 38: Measles

In episode 38 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello and Glenn Rall chat about koi herpesvirus, H1N1 influenza vaccine produced in insect cells, attack by a rabid raccoon, and measles.

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Weekly Science Picks

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Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

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TWiV #38 (63 MB .mp3, 91 minutes)

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TWiV 37: Open Access

In episode 37 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove and guest Eric Freed talk about vesivirus contamination of bioreactors, pandemic influenza, maximizing the effect of vaccination by targeting children, chikungunya virus, and open access scientific journals.

Links for this episode:

Weekly Science Picks

Alan Forrest Mims (website)
Vincent The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell

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Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

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TWiV #37 (51 MB .mp3, 74 minutes)

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Meet the Scientist - Christine Biron - The Innate Immune System

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Christine Biron is the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University in Providence, and she focuses her research program on the mechanisms of the innate immune system – the body’s system of non-specific munitions for fighting off pathogens.  Dr. Biron is also a newly elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

When a pathogen gets on or in your body, your innate immune system is on the front lines, working against the pathogen is a non-specific manner.  In research, the innate immune system got short shrift for a long time, and only in the last 10 or 20 years has the field picked up momentum.  Dr. Biron says back when she was in graduate school “the innate immune system wasn’t thought to be very cool”, but she says the field is fast-moving today, in part because of some major discoveries involving Type-1 interferons, natural killer cells, and an increased appreciation of a wider range of antigen processing cells that link the innate and adaptive immune responses.

In this interview, Dr. Buckley talks with Dr. Biron about our increasing awareness of the innate immune system, why it’s important to bring microbiologists and immunologists together under one big tent, and why it’s best that a battle between a virus and a host ends not in victory for one and defeat for the other, but in détente.

To listen, click the play button below. You can subscribe for free to Dr. Merry Buckley's Meet the Scientist podcast via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email alert.

Direct Download: MTS29

TWiV 36: Pandemic

In episode 36 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Dick Despommier and guest Hamish Young discuss the 2009 influenza pandemic, first 2009 H1N1 vaccine, hunting mosquitoes with midges, vaccine-associated polio in India, and adenoviruses.

Links for this episode:

Weekly Science Picks
Dick The World’s Water by Peter H. Gleick
Hamish Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond; Complications by Atul Gawande
Alan Eurekalert
Vincent Respectful Insolence

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Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

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TWiV #36 (64 MB .mp3, 93 minutes)

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TWiV 35: Much achoo about nothing

In episode 35 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Dick Despommier and guest Richard Kessin talk about Lujo virus, a new arenavirus, influenza, WHO rewriting pandemic rules, adjuvants, and a brief history of microbiology.

Links for this episode:

  • Lujo virus, a new arenavirus
  • Is CDC too optimistic about influenza?
  • WHO to rewrite pandemic rules
  • Adjuvant at wikipedia
  • Avery, MacLeod, McCarty 50th anniversary (pdf)
  • Pasteur’s swan-neck flask

pasteur-swan-neck-flask

Broth was placed in a flask and the neck was heated and drawn out. The broth was open to the air, but remained sterile as long as microbe-containing dust collected in the neck and did not reach the liquid.

Weekly Science Picks
Dick Three papers on origins of infectious diseases (one, two, three)
Rich An Imperfect Lens by Anne Roiphe
Alan Zotero, a FireFox plugin
Vincent e! Science News

Contact/Subscribe

Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

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TWiV #35 (57 MB .mp3, 82 minutes)

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Meet the Scientist - Joseph DeRisi - New Tech Approaches to Infectious Disease

Joseph DeRisi is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

His research focuses on two distinct areas: malaria and new viral pathogen discovery.  Dr. DeRisi is this year’s recipient of the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, granted in recognition of fundamental research of unusual merit in microbiology or immunology by an individual on the threshold of his or her career.

Discovering new viral pathogens seems like exciting work, and DeRisi has lots of ideas for prospecting.  In one recent success with their viral microarray, his group recently helped identify the virus responsible for a devastating disease among rare parrots and other birds: proventricular dilatation disease, or PDD, has been recognized for 30 years, but veterinarians didn’t know the cause or how to control it.  Now that DeRisi’s group has pinpointed Avian Bornavirus as the culprit and sequenced its genome, therapies and control measures to help both captive birds and birds in the wild can’t be far behind.  

In this interview, I asked Dr. DeRisi whether he’s interested in putting the microarray approach to virus discovery to work in uncovering the causes of some human illnesses, especially those diseases we suspect might be spread by viruses, but for which we’ve never found a virus responsible.  He has some very interesting ideas for where to start.  We also talked about his work on identifying the SARS virus, and a new approach in the ongoing fight against malaria.

To listen, click the play button below. You can subscribe for free to Dr. Merry Buckley's Meet the Scientist podcast via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email alert.

Direct Download: MTS28

ID3 Podcast Image Provided by James Gathany Courtesy of the CDC.

TWiV 34: Arsenic and facemasks

In episode 34 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and guest Stephen Morse  discuss progressive vaccinia in a smallpox vaccinee, arsenic and influenza in mice, facemasks and flu transmission, and antigenic and genetic analyses of the new H1N1 influenza virus.

Links for this episode:

Weekly Science Picks
Alan Org-Mode
Vincent Human/Swine A/H1N1 Influenza Origins and Evolution
Stephen The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Contact/Subscribe

Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

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TWiV #34 (54 MB .mp3, 78 minutes)

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TWiV 33 - Live in Philly

In episode 33 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Dick Despommier and guest Raul Andino recorded TWiV live at the ASM General Meeting in Philadelphia, where they discussed increased arterial blood pressure caused by cytomegalovirus infection, restriction of influenza replication at low temperature by the avian viral glycoproteins, first isolation of West Nile virus in Pennsylvania, and current status of influenza.

 

Links for this episode:


Cytomegalovirus infection causes an increase of arterial blood pressure
Avian influenza virus glycoproteins restrict virus replication at low temperature
First West Nile virus isolation of the year in PA
CDC press release of 18 May 2009
Glaxo’s influenza vaccine with adjuvant
NY Times article on Guillain-Barré and a more scientific view

Weekly Science Picks


Dick - National Museum of the History of Science and Medicine, Leiden
Alan - Beginning Mac OS X Programming
Vincent - Vaccinated by Paul Offit
Raul - HubbleSite

Contact/Subscribe

Please send your virology questions and comments to twiv [at] twiv [dot] tv. To listen, click the play button next to the title of this entry. You can subscribe for free to TWIV via iTunes, through the RSS feed with a podcast aggregator or feed reader, or by email.

Thanks to Chris Condayan and ASM for making TWiV live possible. Recorded by Chris Condayan and Ray Ortega.

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TWiV #33 (Audio Only) (51 MB .mp3, 74 minutes)

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MicrobeWorld Video 28 - Cheese and Microbes

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Fine cheeses are like fine wines. Producing and aging them properly is both an art and a science. From cave-aging to the use of raw milk, watch Dr. Catherine Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheeses, describe the microbial world of cheese.

Listeria and Salmonella are just a couple of the pathogens that pose a risk to cheese consumers. In this episode of MicrobeWorld Video, Dr. Donnelly explains how these risks are mitigated through strict processing guidelines, why these safeguards make cheese one of the safest commodities today, and how beneficial organisms contribute to the cheese making process. In addition, Erica Sanford from Cowgirl Creamery with the help of Carolyn Wentz from Everona Dairy walk us through the steps of artisan cheese production.

For more information about cheese making and cheese safety please visit the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheeses. If you would like to try some of the cheeses featured in this episode order them online from www.cowgirlcreamery.com and www.everonadairy.com. Bon Appétit!

 

 

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