Rishi View Point

In our fossil-fuel age, oil spills remain a major problem. From the Exxon Valdez to the recent Prestige disaster in Spain, several million tons of oil soils the world's seas every year, causing ecological catastrophe. Scientists developing cleanup strategies have looked to the microbes that thrive in the wake of such spills as one solution. Now, thanks to a detailed breakdown of one of the most effective of these oil-eaters, they are closer to having biologically based remedies for such environmental disasters. Alcanivorax borkumensis is a rod-shaped bacteria that relies on oil to provide it with energy. Relatively rare in unpolluted seas it quickly comes to dominate the marine microbial ecosystem after an oil spill, and it can be found throughout the world's oceans. V�tor A. P. Martins dos Santos of the German Research Center for Biotechnology and his colleagues broke the marine organism's genome into more than 3 million base pairs and then pieced them together into a c...

New Delhi metallo-ß-lactamase-1, or NDM-1 for short, is a gene carried by bacteria that makes the strain resistant to carbapenem antibiotics. This is concerning because these antibiotics are some of the most powerful ones, used on hard-to-treat infections that evade other drugs. NDM-1 (or more precisely the DNA code for this enzyme) can easily now jump from one strain of bacteria to another. Experts are worried that it may end up in another bacterium which is already resistant to many other antibiotics. Ultimately, it could produce dangerous infections that would spread rapidly from person to person and be almost impossible to treat. Other treatment options are available to fight these infections but they present major challenges for clinicians and will often demand combinations of antibiotics are used. Scientists have identified some strains that have been resistant to all known antibiotics So far, many of the UK cases have been in patients who have recently travelled to India or Paki...