E. coli - you don't want it. You really, really don't. Properly known as Escherichia coli, E. coli are bacteria found in the intestines of humans and animals. While many of them are harmless, some kinds can cause severe gastrointestinal illness, with the most dangerous pathogenic types - such as Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) - potentially leading to kidney failure and death, particularly among vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems.
The federal agency says 23 people in seven provinces got sick with the bacterial illness after eating or handling certain flavours of the frozen snack between early October and late November. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency recalled several pepperoni and bacon Pizza Pops on Sunday due to an E. coli contamination that is under investigation. The outbreak has now reached Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.
A new study from researchers in Germany found that caffeine from coffee and other sources can reduce the effectiveness of certain antibiotics against harmful bacteria. Scientists at the Universities of Tübingen and Würzburg discovered that caffeine triggers a complex chain reaction in E. coli bacteria that makes them less susceptible to antibiotics like ciprofloxacin, a commonly prescribed fluoroquinolone used to treat urinary tract infections, pneumonia and many other bacterial infections.
This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences", says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, California. "The next step is AI-generated life", says Hie, but his colleague Samuel King adds that "a lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism". The study, by Hie, King and colleagues, was posted on the preprint server bioRxivon 17 September and is not yet peer reviewed,
A group of Stanford bioengineers claim that they've created synthetic bacteriophages using AI-generated designs that not only work in the real world, but are far more infectious than their naturally-occurring counterparts. The team, led by Stanford chemical engineering professor Brian Hie, posted a paper to the preprint service bioRxiv Wednesday that details their use of the Evo 1 and Evo 2 models from the Arc Institute (Hie contributed to the design
You may not think of flour as raw, but that's just what it is. No part of the process of harvesting, grinding, bleaching, or packing most types of flour heats it enough to kill bacteria that may be present; cooking it takes care of that. But if you don't cook your flour before consuming, you're putting yourself at risk of food poisoning from Salmonella or E. coli, according to the FDA.
"We're able to transform a prolific environmental and societal waste into such a globally important medication in a way that's completely impossible, using chemistry alone or using biology alone," says study coauthor Stephen Wallace, a chemical biotechnologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
