A2: Microbes in the News (Post 2)

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Harnessing Soil Microbes to Enhance Crop Performance

Phys.org

March 28, 2019

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-harnessing-soil-microbes-crop.html

This article explains that some organizations (the organization they used as an example was the Agriculture and Food Development Authority (TEAGASC)) have been using bacteria to modify different plants’ genome. This has been done for a while using Agrobacterium tumefaciens, but because of limitations, they were looking into alternative bacteria that could perform the same function. They found a bacterium, Ensifer adherens, which can modify a plant’s genome easier than A. tumefaciens. Plants treat A. tumefaciens as something to guard against, which makes modifying certain plants difficult because some plants have a resistance. On the other hand, many plants recognize E. adherens as a symbiotic bacterium. As such, they do not have the same resistance as they do with the A. tumefaciens. The article then discusses some practical applications that E. adherens has been used for already.

We have been covering in class recently how humans control the growth of bacteria with many different antibacterial methods. I found it interesting that even plants have antibacterial methods that make them resilient to certain strains of bacteria. I believe that this story was scientifically accurate, I just would have liked more information on how E. adherens differed from A. tumefaciens to result in more of a symbiotic relationship. Although, I believe that editing out all of the information would make it so a wider variety of audience would be more likely to read the article. All in all, I found this article interesting and informative.

My question is: Is there any other widely-used bacterium that has been identified that can genetically modify plants?

 

A2: Deadly Food Poisoning

Posted by On Filed under Assignments, Microbes in the News 5 Comments

Article and Link:

“Student, 20, died in his sleep from food poisoning bug after eating pasta that he’d left out on a worktop for five days’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6638715/20-year-old-American-student-mysteriously-died-sleep-eating-simple-meal.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490

Summary:

A college student ate noodles with pasta sauce he had reheated after leaving out for 5 days.   Within 30 minutes he came down with a headache nausea, and stomach cramps.   He began vomiting and having diarrhea.   Thinking he had a case of food poisoning, he went to bed to sleep it off and was found dead in his bed 11 hours later.  Upon investigation it was found he died from Bacillus cereus, which is a spore forming bacteria that produces toxins that causes vomiting and diarrhea.   The autopsy showed that the concentration of B. cereus was so high it caused his liver to shut down.   Samples of the food were analyzed, results determined significant contamination within the pasta, no traces within the sauce.

Connections:

As we just talked about spores in class, how easy they are to spread and how deadly they can be I found this article fitting.   Having talked about weaponizing spores, this article shows how contaminated food can have deadly effects.   As we were recently talking about generation times, I did some research and found it only takes 26 minutes for B. cereus to double and 8.6 hours do multiply by 1,000,000!   Which sheds light on why the boy died after leaving the food out for 5 days.

Critical Analysis:

I found this article interesting in that it went with a topic we just talk about.   The testing was completed by a medical examiner and scientists, so I believe the results are accurate.   This was written as a news article, they used easy to understand language making it readable for people not in the science community

Question:

Could a test stick could be created and marketed that could test for common microbes that cause food poisoning that people could use at home or in restaurants?