News & Comment

As anti-vaccination movements gain momentum in some regions, World Immunization Week 2017 reminds us that vaccines work and are safe, and that ideological positions contrary to this truth ignore the weight of scientific evidence and deny a long history of lives being saved, endangering many more.

We asked Jill Banfield, a mineralogist-turned-microbiologist, how she became interested in microbial communities, what she thinks about field work, how she manages a multidisciplinary team, and where microbiome studies are headed next.

While deaths from leading infectious diseases have decreased since the millennium, the threat from potential new outbreaks means that complacency is not an option. The global health community is grossly underprepared to meet new epidemic challenges, but signs suggest that improvement is underway.

Following the launch of an initiative at the World Economic Forum to prevent future epidemics, we spoke to the scientist at the helm of this coalition, John-Arne Røttingen, who answered our questions on epidemic preparedness, moving from academia to public health policy, evidence-based decision-making, and more.

CRISPR–Cas is an adaptive immune system found in Bacteria and Archaea that confers sequence-specific protection against invasion by foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR–Cas is also a powerful tool for microbiology education and has been an inspiring model for our students for the past three years.

Encouraging researchers to become activists and engage with the public to combat the rising tide of scientific mistrust is easier said than done. Harder still will be to better enable PhDs to thrive in careers away from science, in the public and private sectors, but doing so could bear substantial fruit in the long-term.

Many species of Archaea, Bacteria and eukaryotes are polyploid in natural populations. The mixture of species with unknown but widely varying ploidy levels compromises marker-gene-based analyses of community structures, population dynamics and microbiomes.