Shows
Life Science and Biotech CEO storiesMeet the Reluctant Founder who is waging war on Antibiotic Resistant Infections!Our guest today is another Atlanta luminary, Dr. Marvin
Whiteley, the founder and CSO of SynthBiome, Inc. Deaths are expected to increase over the next 20-30 years due to antibiotic resistant infections.
It’s common for people to go into the hospital for something innocuous, get an infection, and find that the bacterium doesn’t respond to antibiotic. There are strains infecting people outside of clinical settings, as well. As there are millions of deaths caused by this each year, the alarm bells are starting to go off because we are not developing a lot of ne...
2024-07-1052 min
microTalkThe Rules of Attraction: Bacterial Magnetosomes with Arash KomeiliSome bacteria have the amazing ability to orient themselves using the earth’s magnetic field, due to the presence of an intracellular organelle called the magnetosome, which are estimated to have evolved 3 billion years ago. Dr. Arash Komeili is a Professor at the University of California Berkeley who studies bacterial magnetosomes. Dr. Komeili talks about how magnetotactic bacteria were discovered, how the earth’s magnetic field orients the bacteria in the aquatic environment, whether a Martian meteorite had bacterial magnetite in it, how bacterial magnetosomes can be exploited for targeting cancer cells, and whether bacterial magneto...
2019-12-1652 minmicroTalkGeezer Germs: Geriatric Bacteria with Steve FinkelWhat happens when a bacterium gets old? Continuous culture of bacteria without any added nutrients can reveal the dynamics of “old” bacteria. Dr. Steve Finkel is a Professor at University of Southern California who studies what happens beyond “stationary phase” in bacterial cultures. Finkel studies the Growth Advantage in Stationary Phase (GASP) phenotype, which dominates in “old” bacterial cultures, and which represents adaptive evolutionary change. Finkel talks about how studying old bacteria gives insight into aging in other organisms, whether bacteria can divide forever, how bacteria choose not to divide unless they are certain they can finish d...
2019-11-191h 03
This Week in MicrobiologyGeorgia Tech microbialHosts: Vincent Racaniello, Michele Swanson and Michael Schmidt Guests: Deanna Beatty, Mark Hay, Gina Lewin, Frank Stewart, and Marvin Whiteley At Georgia Tech, members and trainees of the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection discuss the identification of pathogen essential genes during coinfections, and how coral management can improve coral defenses against pathogens. Become a patron of TWiM. Links for this episode: Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection Pathogen essential genes during coinfection (PNAS) Managing coral protects from pathogens (Sci Adv) Music used on TWiM is composed and performed...
2019-10-311h 22
The magCulture PodcastEpisode 11, June 2019, ModMagNYCJeremy Leslie and Liv Siddall talk magazines, recorded at the magCulture in London with interviews from our recent New York residency.
The episode starts with an overview of new mags, including the Neat Review, Banana and Dazed. Plus the new book about RayGun magazine, from founder Marvin Scott Jarrett.
We then switch to New York, where we hear from ModMagNYC speakers Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff (gal-dem), Beth Wilkinson (Lindsay), Ian Birch (‘Uncovered’) and Douglas McGray (California Sunday, Pop-Up Magazine) plus guests Josef Reyes (Day Plus Night), Deidre Dyer (No Man’s Land), Alison Branch (Park) and Cath Caldwell (CSM).
Liv and Jeremy then p...
2019-06-2443 minmicroTalkBabbling Bacteria: Quorum Sensing with Marvin WhiteleyBacteria talk to each other using molecules that allow them to coordinate group behaviors, which has been termed “quorum sensing”. A number of bacteria utilize quorum sensing to form gangs that coordinate beneficial behaviors such as symbiotic light production, as well as detrimental behaviors such as attacking their host. Dr. Marvin Whiteley is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies bacterial chatter. He has developed some innovative means to investigate bacterial chitchat, including trapping small clusters of bacteria in tiny synthesized “lobster traps” to see what kind of dialogue ensues. Dr. Whitele...
2018-09-2558 min
Point of DiscoveryJekyll and Hyde BacteriaTo study diseases, biologists often make models, for example, a rat with a disorder similar to Alzheimer's. With a good model, they can tinker with different variables and see if anything halts the disease, without the ethical limits of experimenting on actual humans. But scientists studying an especially nasty bacterium that tends to invade and breed out of control in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) kept hitting dead ends in their search for a good model.
Pigs and rats that were genetically engineered to have the same gene defect that causes CF in humans...
2016-03-2006 min