Synopsis: A blurb about a recent paper from my lab [1], on our discovery that the bacterium that causes cholera can manipulate the mechanical environment of an animal gut to expel resident bacteria. Introduction: cholera’s tools, and ours Cholera killed more people in the 19th century than any other epidemic disease, and it continues to … Continue reading New Tricks from an Old Bacterium
A few evenings ago I gave a “science pub” talk — part of a long-running series of public presentations that the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry runs at several sites in the state. (This was at a local pizza place, so thankfully I could just bike to it.) I called the talk “Glimpses of … Continue reading Science Pub 2016
(I wrote a shorter version of this post for the META Center blog, here.) A large fraction of my research group’s efforts are devoted to understanding the structure and dynamics of gut microbial communities — the multitude of microbes that we, like all animals, house in our digestive tracts. Our approach is a very direct … Continue reading Glimpses of Gut Microbes
I like graphs. At their best they are useful, elegant, and thought-provoking. At their worst, they’re infuriating. Modern systems-ish biology seems to have an abundance of awful graphs, even in good papers (as noted earlier, for example), perhaps because the complex statistical procedures it often uses are hard to make sense of. There’s no excuse … Continue reading (Another) bad graph
The Eighteenth Elephant 