Miami University has joined the National Genomics Research Initiative (NGRI) offered by HHMI Science Education Alliance (SEA) in their Phage Genomics course. The students go directly into the lab, participating in an authentic research experience. In a full-year academic course they: isolate and characterize bacterial viruses from their local soil prepare the viral DNA [...]
A Planet of Viruses Carl Zimmer The University of Chicago Press 109 pages Interesting things happen when physicists decide to go into biological research. They ask questions that biologists generally won’t. For example, viruses have small genomes, but they also have very small storage space in their capsids. Bacteriophages inject their genetic material into the [...]
Sometimes I get the feeling that all life on Earth basically serves as a vehicle for viral replication and propagation. Viruses thrive in all three domains, they embed themselves in all creature’s genomes, they may lie dormant in the genome for eons or decimate whole populations in a few years, and they are the most [...]
There are few infectious diseases as violent and as lethal as the Ebola Haemorragic Fever. This terrible disease was first described in 1976 at a mission hospital at the Ebola river in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The disease is 80% fatal, the victims die painfully from a literal meltdown of their organs. [...]
1976: Prologue In July 27, 1976, the American Legion, a US military veterans association, held a large meeting at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel a hotel in Philadelphia PA, celebrating the USA’s bicentennial year. Within 2 days, guests started falling ill with an atypical pneumonia. By the end of the week, 221 people were ill and [...]
