Micro Eclectics

Two compounds derived from garlic may help contaminants in baby formula, says a UBC study. Photo: Rüdiger Wölk, Münster/Wikimedia Commons. Garlic may be bad for your breath, but it’s good for your baby, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia. The study, recently published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology , is the first to identify two compounds derived from garlic – diallyl sulfide and ajoene – that significantly reduce the contamination risk of Cronobacter sakazakii in the production of dry infant formula powder. The discovery could make the product safer to consume, easing the minds of new mothers who can’t or opt not to breastfeed. “A trace dose of these two compounds is extremely effective in killing C. sakazakii in the food manufacturing process,” says Xiaonan Lu, corresponding author and assistant professor of food safety engineering in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. “They have the potential to eliminate the path...

The more we look, the more we realise just how important intact ecosystems are for our own well-being - and it really doesn’t matter at which scale we are looking. When Alan Cooper , Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA , asked me (Corey) for a bit of help with a cool paper he and some of his colleagues were working on, I was initially sceptical. Why would an ecologist be even remotely interested in dentistry? I mean seriously - oral hygiene? Then he went into detail, and I couldn’t refuse. Before we get into that detail, we have to tell a story about a colleague of ours (name withheld, but true story) who recently went to the dentist to have some routine cleaning done. There was nothing particularly special about his visit - no local anaesthetic, no extractions, no caps, and certainly no surgery. Two weeks later he was in the hospital getting his chest cracked open for open-heart surgery. What happened was a microscopic bit of his dental plaque had di...

Chemicals are all around us. They are crucial in all manner of industries, from agriculture to food to cosmetics. Most people give little thought to how these chemicals are made – and certainly very few would consider the chemical industry as a contributor to our society’s dependence on oil. But it is. Historically petroleum has been used to develop the chemicals needed for products such as pesticides, food supplements and make-up. Although many of the building blocks required to make these chemicals occur naturally, trying to take those natural materials and use them in large-scale industrial processes has proved difficult and costly. So petroleum is used instead. Until recently, oil was seen as a cheap commodity which was available in abundance, so petroleum was perfect for use in the chemical industry. However, the world has changed. We now recognise the need to reduce our reliance on oil in order to protect the environment and maintain our national security....

We invariably imagine electronic devices to be made from silicon chips, with which computers store and process information as binary digits (zeros and ones) represented by tiny electrical charges. But it need not be this way: among the alternatives to silicon are organic mediums such as DNA. DNA computing was first demonstrated in 1994 by Leonard Adleman who encoded and solved the travelling salesman problem , a maths problem to find the most efficient route for a salesman to take between hypothetical cities, entirely in DNA. Deoxyribonucleaic acid, DNA, can store vast amounts of information encoded as sequences of the molecules, known as nucleotides, cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T). The complexity and enormous variance of different species’ genetic codes demonstrates how much information can be stored within DNA encoded using CGAT, and this capacity can be put to use in computing. DNA molecules can be used to process information, using a b...

Bacteria are single-celled microorganisms abundant in nature that can’t be seen with the naked eye. In fact, there are approximately five multiplied by 10³¹ bacteria on the earth, constituting 90% of its biomass. These microorganisms are found everywhere in our environment and are vitally important to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. They cycle carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen, regulate and affect the growth of plants and animals, and are at the base of most food chains. Microorganisms also play a pivotal role in human health, as most areas of our body that come in contact with the outside environment, such as the skin and gastrointestinal tract, harbour resident (colonising) bacteria. In fact, there are about ten times as many bacterial cells inside and on you than there are human cells. These colonising bacteria don’t cause disease under normal conditions. They actually protect us by preventing the growth of harmful bacteria. But sometimes colonisin...

Antibiotics are compounds that can kill bacteria. Many antibiotics are produced naturally by bacteria themselves as they compete for food or living space with other bacterial species. Over time, bacteria that are always exposed to antibiotics will be under selective pressure to evolve resistance to them; the members of the population that are more resistant will be the ones to reproduce more often. Bacterial species reproduce incredibly rapidly compared to human beings, leading to rapid evolution within species. Under the right conditions, for instance, the common gut bacterium Escherichia coli can reproduce in just thirty minutes. Bacteria can also swap antibiotic resistance genes via a process known as horizontal gene transfer . That means that if antibiotic resistance develops in one bacterial species in an environment, there’s a good chance other bacteria can pick up that resistance as well. It’s a problem for human beings if bacterial pathogens, through this ...

Wound infections can occur when bacteria from the skin or from the environment are introduced into damaged tissues. Crucially, all wounds are colonised by bacteria but under certain conditions these bacteria can multiply unchecked, growing to reach numbers that overwhelm the immune system . Most wound infections can easily be treated with topical antimicrobials, or in more serious cases, by a course of antibiotics. They are also most commonly seen in clinical environments where, for example, infection-causing bacteria are inadvertently introduced into surgical incision sites after surgery. Despite rigorous cleaning and hygiene regimens, infections are often unavoidable because of the prevalence of bacteria in the environment and as part of normal human flora. When you add in that antibiotic resistant bacteria are rife within clinical environments, this can make these wound infections exceptionally difficult to treat. Chronic, inflammed s...