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Our Microbe Friends #6 Miracle Mould
In 1939 the search was on for chemicals that could treat bacterial infections – a really serious issue with war looming. In Oxford Howard Florey and Ernst Chain came across Fleming’s work and started to look at penicillin. They infected mice with pneumonia and injected half of them with penicillin. The next day all the injected mice were fine, and all the others were dead. Chain rightly described…
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Our Microbe Friends #5 Miracle Mould!
Moulds are a group of fungi. They’re very important in the process of decay, and they also create the ‘veins’ in blue cheeses like Stilton. But there are a few that do something far more important than giving us something tasty to put on biscuits…
In 1928 Professor Alexander Fleming went on holiday (something you could still do, back then…). He was working on the bacteria that cause sore throats,…
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Our Microbe Friends #4: Fabulous Fungi
Fungi are a strange and wonderful group of organisms. They’re not animals OR plants: they have a whole Kingdom to themselves. And not all of them are microbes – that’s obvious, if you’ve ever eaten a mushroom: you didn’t need a microscope to find it on your plate. So, what are they?
If you see a mushroom growing in the ground, you are only seeing the reproductive bit of the fungus. The rest is…
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Our Microbe Friends #3: The Wonders of Compost
Still talking rot tonight… Did you realise that if you have a compost heap in your garden, or if you put food waste out for recycling, you are enlisting an army of trillions of microbes to help you?
Making compost is like magic – but it’s just biology (mind you, I find biology pretty magical). I’ve just chucked an apple core on my compost heap; what’s going to happen to it?
First, the local cats…
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Our Microbe Friends #2 Let's Talk Rot!
Our Microbe Friends #2 Let’s Talk Rot!
Time to meet some more of our microbe friends… the ones who make things decay . Now you may think this is NOT a helpful activity when it happens to food in your kitchen, though it can look quite entertaining if you speed it up – have a look at this.
You may also be wondering why there’s a picture of The Lion King here… It’s the Circle of Life, of course!
The only source of chemicals to build new…
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Our Microbe Friends #1
I know this title may seem a bit strange given what we’re all girding our loins to go through, but I worry that a whole generation of children (and some adults) are going to be left with a real neurotic fear of microbes, so I thought I’d try to redress the balance a little bit.
Think of the microbe kingdom the way you think of the animal kingdom: some animals are dangerous and you would steer…
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