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Colossal microbes taking over the world sounds like a B-movie plot, rather than the business plan of a stuffed toy manufacturer. We asked Drew Oliver, the creator and CEO of Giant Microbes, about how the company came about, how their products have been received and his plans for the future.
The identification of plasmid-borne resistance to an antibiotic of last resort suggests that the final pharmacological barrier holding Gram-negative bacterial infections at bay may soon be breached.
Advances in culturing hepatitis C virus have given hope for a universal cell culture system amenable to primary isolate replication. However, low replication efficiency needs to be overcome. The development of fully susceptible yet immunocompetent in vivo models would aid research towards a prophylactic vaccine.
The Renaissance was a time marked by renewed appreciation of the achievements that came before and the re-ignited desire to uncover new insights into the order of the natural world, a description that is equally apt for the microbiology field of today.
Michele Banks (also known as @artologica) is a US-based painter and collage artist whose works are based on scientific and medical themes, and who has a particular fascination with all things microbial. We caught up with Michele to ask about her art and the inspiration behind it.
