Animalcules, Volume 1, Issue 4

Welcome to Animalcules, the carnival of all things microbial. I got a few entries at the last minute, and dug through some blogs of usual suspects for a few more, and I hope you enjoy the choices.

Tara Smith of Aetiology, the inventor and founder of this carnival, sent in The potential of papilloma virus vaccines, but I thought that - in the spirit of "more the merrier" - another post may also be included: Determining an infectious cause...not as easy as you'd think.

Mike the Mad Biologist sent in An Interview About Antibiotics and Agriculture, but I also picked an additonal post: More on Phage Therapy...or two: Wash Your Damn Hands, Part I - Can't Count That High

A protist, Plasmodium falciparum, is the main character in this Circadiana post: Some hypotheses about a possible connection between malaria and jet-lag.

And if you think that Plasmodium and other protists have incredibly complicated life cycles, you ain't seen nothing yet! From Grrrlscientist comes Spermatogenocide, with a quiz at the end! Your work may not be safe for this post!

Paul Orwin has some Challenges in Microbiology. Of course, hypothesis-testing is not the only part of scientific method (outside freshman science classes), so he is home free.

Sandra Porter of Discovering biology in a digital world is asking: What allows a virus to begin infecting a new species? Doing the cross-species hop

Carl Zimmer on The Loom - we all have viruses:The Sixty-Million-Year Virus

On Effect Measure, I found a post with a very un-Animalcules-like title - Cats, dogs, birds, but it is really about all the animals that avian flu can infect.

Complex Medium wrote a variety of stuff on microorganisms lately, some more, some less serious in tone - find out which is which:
Compensatory mutations to antibiotic resistance
Virus as metaphor
Running out of targets?, and
Finally, something we can use

Technology in Teaching sent in the picture of her scarf with a microbe on it - it is Mycobacterium, the tuberculosis fella. With Blogger being a mess, she could not post the image, and I could not do it on two of my four blogs (thus the ascetic look of this carnival!), so you have to go look at it here.

Animalcules will resume in two weeks. Volume 1, Issue 5. will appear on April 6, 2006 to be hosted at Complex Medium.