Pathogen security and human biosecurity for microbiologists

Methylene Blue Based Device for Pathogen Reduction in Human Plasma

Abstract Background Despite improvement in safety of plasma transfusion some virus transmission still remains a problem. So as World Health Organization (WHO) recommends, many countries developed Pathogen Reduction Technologies (PRT) to inactivate pathogens, in plasma components. The Methylene Blue (MB) based methods is one of the most universal one. The purpose of this research was, produce...

Microarrays for microbiologists.

We are witnessing a remarkable change in the scale of molecular microbiological research and we are entering an era of ‘big science’. In the past decade we have moved from a time when entire research papers were based on the sequencing of a single gene or operon to a single paper describing the sequence of a whole genome. The completion of microbial genomes is continuing apace, with 37 genome s...

Databases for Microbiologists

Databases play an increasingly important role in biology. They archive, store, maintain, and share information on genes, genomes, expression data, protein sequences and structures, metabolites and reactions, interactions, and pathways. All these data are critically important to microbiologists. Furthermore, microbiology has its own databases that deal with model microorganisms, microbial divers...

Glycomics for Microbes and Microbiologists

The recent article "Lectin-Glycan Interaction Network-Based Identification of Host Receptors of Microbial Pathogenic Adhesins" by Ielasi et al. describes a new development in microbial carbohydrate analysis [Ielasi FS, Alioscha-Perez M, Donohue D, Claes S, Sahli H, Schols D, Willaert RG, mBio 7(4):e00584-16, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00584-16]. Specific carbohydrate ligands have been...

The global health security agenda in an age of biosecurity.