TWiV discusses an outbreak of influenza H5N1 that killed over half of the great cats at a Washington sanctuary, origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China, and the diverse and abundant phages that enter cells via receptors encoded on conjugative plasmids.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, and Jolene Ramsey
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Links for this episode
- Support science education at MicrobeTV
- ASV 2025 4:37
- H5N1 virus kills great cats at Washington sanctuary (CNN) 8:10
- Macroevolution of bat coronaviruses in China (Nat Comm) 10:15
- EcoHealth Alliance funding suspended (Science) 32:00
- Conjugative plasmids support diverse and abundant phages (Nat Comm) 38:35
- Letters read on TWiV 1181 1:25:05
- Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks!
Weekly Picks 1:34:24
Rich – Pareidolia (wiki)
Jolene – Pathways to Science database
Vincent – Wendy Carlos and Switched-On Bach
Listener Picks
Arjan – Gutsick Gibbon’s YouTube channel
Alan – 2024 Nobel Prize Lectures in Chemistry
Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees
Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv
Content in this podcast should not be construed as medical advice.
The post TWiV 1181: Seek and ye shall find, coronaviruses and phage first appeared on This Week in Virology.
what about The neuraminidase of bat influenza viruses, I read that ir is not a real neuraminidase?? it´s truth that??
That is correct: the N10 and N11 proteins found in bat influenza viruses are not neuraminidases, that is, they do not cleave sialic acid. That is why they are called NA-like. More here: http://www.virology.ws/2013/11/12/influenza-a-viruses-in-bats/
Dear Vincent and the TWIV team,
I listened to the last two TWIVs on Thursday while I was driving to and from Tours (I was on my way to have the purification of BK virus VLPs demonstrated to me by Antoine Touzé). Since it is about a two and a half hour drive each way, I had plenty of time, but I thought that 3 episodes in one day was going to give me a bit of an overload.
Anyway, my comment doesn’t concern virology, rather Rich Condit’s pick concerning colour vision and language. The TV documentary that Rich linked seems to be the latest twist in a long story that is beautifully told in the linguist Guy Deutscher’s book, “Through the language glass”. In fact, the question of language and its effect on colour vision goes back to the 19th century (rather curiously because the British prime minister W.E. Gladstone pointed out that Homer’s use of colour in the Odyssey and the Iliad was rather odd – in particular, Homer never described anything as being blue, and famously talked of a “wine-dark sea”). Subsequently, during the late 19th – early 20th century several expeditions set out to test colour vision and language in a variety of different isoolated ethnic groups. It turns out that many groups of hunter-gatherers / pastoralists have languages with simpler colour schemes, and indeed, languages with words only for “black”, “white”, and “red” are not uncommon. However, people who speak those languages can still pick out different colours along the whole visual spectrum, even if they do not have words to differentiate between “blue” and “green” for example. Incidentally, 100 or more years ago this was done with a set of woollen threads dyed different colours, rather than with a computer or TV screen. This indicates that there is no fundamental difference in colour vision between humans – in the sense that we all have the same hardware for detecting different colours.
However, as pointed out in the documentary, language does appear to affect processing of colour information, in that distinctions between different hues are recognized more quickly when different words are used to describe those hues. In the documentary, this is shown with the Himba, who have two words for different types of green, and this had previously been demonstrated by comparing the recognition of different types of blue in Russian and English speakers. Russian, unlike English, has two words for blue (Sinii for dark, navy blue; Goluboy for clear, azure blue), and sure enough, Russian speakers can distinguish shades of blue quicker than English speakers.
PS – with respect to gain of function research, perhaps you could invite Simon Wain-Hobson to explain why he thinks influenza researchers should not perform certain types of experiments.