The TWiM holobionts pay tribute to Stuart Levy, and reveal the remarkably diverse array of cyclic nucleotides synthesized by bacteria that likely mediate interactions with animal and plant hosts.
Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Elio Schaechter, Michele Swanson and Michael Schmidt
Right click to download TWiM#206 (47 MB .mp3, 65 minutes)
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Links for this episode
- Stuart Levy, Antibiotic Resistance Researcher, Dies
- Resistance fighter (The Scientist)
- Stuary Levy on TWiM 16
- Segregation of R factors (Nature)
- Infectious drug resistance (Sci Am)
- Spread of antibiotic resistance chickens to humans (Nature)
- Costs of antimicrobial resistance (Clin Inf Dis)
- Bacteria synthesize diverse nucleotide signals (Nature)
- Letters read on TWiM 206
Music used on TWiM is composed and performed by Ronald Jenkees and used with permission.
Send your microbiology questions and comments to twim@microbe.tv
Dear esteemed TWIM hosts, many thanks for another thought provoking episode.
Your reference to cGAS/STING and interferon got me thinking somewhat tangentially about references to the presence of z-DNA stimulating interferon production and I would be interested in knowing if there is any accepted view of the role of z-DNA. z-DNA appears to have been initially thought of as a relic of using artificial conditions to determine DNA structure, but there now appears to be a school of thought that cells have adapted to recognise z-DNA (such as with Alu sequences – and possibly also viruses) leading to a cellular response and I would be interested in your thoughts. I did check Flint’s Virology but I couldn’t see any anti-viral z-DNA responses being covered.
By the way I came across the reference “Z-DNA and Z-RNA in human disease” by Herbert in January’s edition of Nature Communications Biology where he discusses Alu.
Many thanks, Rich