“Artificial two-dimensional biological habitats were prepared from porous polymer layers and inoculated with the fungus Penicillium roqueforti to provide a living material. Such composites of classical industrial ingredients and living microorganisms can provide a novel form of functional or smart materials with capability for evolutionary adaptation. We demonstrated a design of such living materials and showed both active (eating) and waiting (dormant, hibernation) states with additional recovery for reinitiation of a new active state by observing the metabolic activity over two full nutrition cycles of the living material (active, hibernation, reactivation). This novel class of living materials can be expected to provide nonclassical solutions in consumer goods such as packaging, indoor surfaces, and in biotechnology.”
Hm. Some really practical uses of microbes – impregnating fabrics to provide bioactive activity.
Read this article…
“The story of a group of University of Massachusetts students who set out to initiate the construction of the school’s first permaculture garden a year ago is a remarkable one, but it’s only the beginning of a worldwide movement.”
This is really interesting. Small-scale farming was killed by industrial farming to feed huge masses. But could it be that small-scale farming, like it used to be, to feed a local group, say a family or a cafeteria, is making a comeback? That would be cool.
Question: does technology and science help make us better “micro-farmers”?
Read this article…
Image of the garden from the article linked above.
 As you know, I’m always looking for practical uses of microbes. One that I stumbled upon a long while back was “transfaunation”, or, seeding one person’s gut with microbes from another’s. Yes, transfering poop microbes from one to another.
Be an adult. Don’t get grossed out. I’ve read some great papers on the process how our guts get colonized after birth. Also, there are some really interesting papers on how our gut microbes (or lack thereof) are involved in various intestinal disorders. And there are some promising papers on how diet affect the bacterial ecology in the gut. [Sorry, I'll link to the papers in a larger gut related set of posts at some point in the future - you can also just search for gut and microbes in my posts.]
Here’s the basic idea. People suffering from the hardy C. diff bacteria are generally prescribed a powerful antibiotic. Problem is, the drugs don’t just kill the invaders; they also wipe out much of the beneficial bacteria in the gut. With these “good” microorganisms out of the way, any C. diff stragglers have a much easier time regrouping for a second bout of illness. If there were some way to respawn the beneficial bacteria in the intestines, such re-infections could be warded off. Some people, like Ruth, turn to expensive probiotic supplements. (At one point she was spending $350 on them every week.) But in certain cases, a patient who has lost nearly all of her good bacteria will find it nearly impossible to get them back. A fecal transplant seems to work as a sort of mega-probiotic, allowing doctors to repopulate a patient’s intestines with the appropriate microorganisms by placing a robust sample directly into her gut.
Slate had a nice article on the subject (quoted above). It’s a serious subject and for many, the only hope to get a better and healthier bacterial gut fauna (hence the term, transfaunation).
My wife’s a vet and she’s not only heard of this procedure, but performed it on animals. It’s not uncommon to jumpstart an animal’s ability to digest grass by grabbing bugs from one animal and putting it in the right place. And, did you know, some animals eat poop on purpose for this very reason – rabbits, capibaras, hamsters, elephants, termites, pandas, koalas, and hippos – to colonize their gut?
And really, folks eat yogurt to populate their gut with good bacteria. Why not poo bacteria as probiotics? I actually think, as we learn more about our gut fauna, this will be come a more accepted course of action for folks with nasty bowel infections, colitis, or inflammatory bowel diseases.
What do you think?
Image of Kristen Paulson’s Anatomy and Guts Embroidery Hoop Art on Etsy (get your own!)
 I stumbled upon domestic-use in-vessel composters (on a lead from @harvestpower, of course).
I had heard of in-vessel composting, but never realized that at least two companies created machines that you plug in, feed with your organic waste (with addition of saw dust), and out comes compost.
As far as I can tell, the process is very fast, so it’s immature compost (composting has a final curing step). But I’m sure the raw stuff that comes out of these machines is pretty good. And to me, one could use this machine for the first step and have a larger separate bin for the curing step.
The two are:
- NatureMill Automatic Compost Bin is from San Francisco (it’s the silver box in the pic on right*)
- And GreenGood are the North American distributors of the Oklin (Korea) in-vessel composter. The interesting thing about the Oklin composters is that they use a special thermophile (called “acidulo” bacteria).
I am so tempted to buy one. Maybe the manufacturers could “lend” me a machine for review and comparisons (hint hint)?
Alas, my wife suggested I build one myself. Gah. Not happening soon.
Image from Nature Mill
*The picture cracks me up. It’s such a Euro-couple. And she’s smiling at him as he dumps an almost full plate of food in the bin. Perhaps it was some bad cooking? Only, whose – his or hers? Sheesh.
“Widely described as the point of no return, the event horizon of SgrA* would be the largest in our skies, but still just 30 microarcseconds across — the apparent size of a tennis ball on the Moon when viewed from Earth. To capture its image would be a stunning technical achievement in itself, but it would also open the door to further studies of how black holes spin and gather material, as well as probing some fundamental aspects of space-time and general relativity. And the first picture taken of our local supermassive black hole — the most enigmatic and charismatic of all the wonders of the Universe — would surely be one of the defining images of the time. It might even knock everyday trouble and strife from the front pages, and perhaps even, for a while, from people’s minds.”
Cool.
Read this article…
“What’s the news: If bacteria had blood, the predatory microbe Micavibrio aeruginosavorus would essentially be a vampire: it subsists by hunting down other bugs, attaching to them, and sucking their life out. For the first time, researchers have sequenced the genome of this strange microorganism, which was first identified decades ago in sewage water. The sequence will help better understand the unique bacterium, which has potential to be used as a “living antibiotic” due to its ability to attack drug-resistant biofilms and its apparent fondness for dining on pathogens.”
Absolutely awesome. And if there’s one bug that does this, there must be many many more.
Read this article…
“The traditional view of mRNA as a pure intermediate between DNA and protein has changed in the last decades since the discovery of numerous RNA processing pathways. A frequent RNA modification is A-to-I editing, or the conversion of adenosine (A) to inosine (I).”
Hah. One more inflection point in the complexity of molecular biology. I think the reality is that life doesn’t give a hoot about the individual organism, but is one gigantic randomization engine (or should I say, purposeful variation), sampling adjacent possibles, giving rise to genomic variants of all sorts, with some variants tending towards even greater complexity and randomization techniques. [Hm, that's a brain wave developing there...]
Read this article…
“The Microbial Home Probe consists of a domestic ecosystem that challenges conventional design solutions to energy, cleaning, food preservation, lighting, human waste and healthy lifestyle.”
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Microbial Home by Philips
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Paternoster plastic grinder and mushroom grower
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Bio light
Very cool. And mentions of a Post Electronic Age, too.
Read this article…
Images from Philips – more at Microbial Home
“Although these appliances won’t be manufactured any time soon, lifelike models of the concepts are currently on view at the Piet Hein Eek gallery during Dutch Design Week (which opened on October 22 and runs through October 30) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. While the thought of cooking dinner with gas harvested from bathroom waste might not seem appetizing, the elegant concepts of Philips’ Microbial Home appliance system may seduce some skeptics via the power of their eye-catching design.”
[via @erigentry]
Read this article…
“Prebiotics are selectively fermented ingredients that allow specific changes in the gastrointestinal microbiota that confer health benefits to the host. However, the effects of prebiotics on the human gut microbiota are incomplete as most studies have relied on methods that fail to cover the breadth of the bacterial community. The goal of this research was to use high throughput multiplex community sequencing of 16S rDNA tags to gain a community wide perspective of the impact of prebiotic galactooligosaccharide (GOS) on the fecal microbiota of healthy human subjects.”
I’ve seen a ton of papers on “probiotics”, but I think this is the first I’ve heard of “prebiotics”. There is mounting data about the effect of gut bugs on our own systems, and there is a growing set of data on how our diet affects our gut bugs. A wee Google search shows that there’s been a lot of papers data on specific foods that selectively promote the growth of specific gut bugs.
Hm, this is really interesting. It all seems to be coming together. My suggestion: if you’re a grad student or a post-doc in biology, human gut microbiology and ecology is gonna be a big topic in the near future. It’s gonna change the face of medicine.
Read this article…
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