Need some good microbiology kids books? Take a look at the Reading Round-Up!
Reading Round-Up: Microbiology Books for Kids!
It’s All About the Breast Milk Sugars, Baby
Helpful infant gut bacterium, Bifidobacterium infantis, uses special breast milk sugars to grow that other bacteria can’t use. Breast Milk Sugars Don’t Feed the Infant As parents we often try to limit sugar for our kids. However, with breast milk – the sugars are essential food for helpful bacteria that grow in an infant’s gut. Along with fats, water, antioxidants from mom’s diet, antibodies, and other compounds, breast milk has a diversity of complex carbohydrate sugars. Called human milk oligosaccharides (HMO), these chains of carbohydrates bonded together are difficult to break apart. Humans do not make the enzymes that can break these breast milk sugar bonds [1, 2]. Our helpful gut bacteria do [3-6]. Infants and most gut bacteria don’t have the enzymes in their guts to digest the sugars that dominate human breast milk. The beneficial bacterium, Bifidobacterium infantis, uses enzyme Endo BI-1 for breaking sugars to use for food. This may explain why B. infantis dominates the gut of breast fed babies. HMO sugars are extremely different from their refined and over-processed cousins that we use to sweeten our drinks and solid foods. Refined and processed sugars are primarily simple carbohydrates made of a few carbon molecules bound together
Book Review: The Invisible War
The graphic novel “The Invisible War: A Tale on Two Scales” tells stories of the macroscopic (nurses) and microscopic (bacteriophage) heroes fighting dysentery at the Western Front of World War I. Interweaving Views of Tales, Scales, and Heroes “The Invisible War: A Tale of Two Scales” works its magic, interweaving the stories of two rarely discussed topics – dysentery and bacteriophage – and two rarely intertwined fields of study – science and history. The resulting story is a rich tapestry full of action and information at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels. “The Invisible War” tells about Annie, a nurse at a field hospital at the Western Front of World War I. In her nursing experience, Annie has learned the symptoms and consequences of dysentery, at a time when the cause wasn’t well understood and no reliable cure was known.
Book Review: Welcome to the Microbiome
Welcome to the Microbiome is at the top of my list of recommended books about the human microbiome. Written by scientists and museum curators, Dr. Susan Perkins and Dr. Rob DeSalle to accompany the American Museum of Natural History’s microbiome exhibit “The Secret World Inside You”, Welcome to the Microbiome, introduces readers to not only to the human microbiome, but also to the science behind the research. It is aimed at people interested in the process and findings of the newly emerging field of microbiome biology and its importance for human existence and health. This book introduces anyone interested in basic cell biology, genomics, and microbiology to these subjects while weaving stories about human-microbiome interactions.
Missing Microbes and Increased Antibiotic Resistance
Dr. Martin Blaser’s book Missing Microbes details his observations and hypotheses on how overuse and misuse of antibiotics may be the source of modern non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, and obesity. The maps of the U.S. colored with obesity and antibiotic prescriptions fit extremely well – and centered on my Southern homeland. Could it be that the obesity epidemic, diabetes, allergies, asthma, and other non-communicable diseases that are centered over the American South are not due to our preference for all things fried or sopped in butter and washed down with a swig of sweet tea? It’s not just due to sitting in front of screens too much. Certainly poor diet and little exercise don’t help. But could an over-use of antibiotics also be to blame? That was the hypothesis. Obesity Caused by Over Use of Antibiotics? Dr. Martin Blaser from NYU’s experimental research on mice demonstrated drastic changes in the different types of gut bacteria present before and after antibiotic use. More strikingly, when the antibiotic use was discontinued and the bacterial populations rebounded, the bacterial types that did come back were different metabolically. Antibiotics drastically effected the gut microbiome. Does antibiotic somehow set us on a path