To mark the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death from laryngeal tuberculosis at the age of 40 in June 1924, the University of Oxford ran a series of events, including talks, an exhibition and a public reading of the Metamorphosis in the Sheldonian Theatre.
It is believe he lived with tuberculosis for the last 7 years of his life and it likely affected his writings, including works such as The Hunger Artist. In recognition there was a public talk on 5 June 2024 entitled “Tuberculosis: vaccines, diagnostics and experience” with contributions on vaccines by Professor Helen McShane and diagnostics by one of our Unit, Dr Philip Fowler.
The highlight however was hearing the experience of someone who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis about 20 years and how, despite, surviving this ancient disease, it has profoundly affected how she lives day to day.
Join Our Microbe Drawing Competition and Win a Cuddly Toy! 🦠🎨
We are thrilled to announce an exciting opportunity for budding young scientists and artists alike! Our Microbe Drawing Competition is now open, and we are inviting participants of all ages to get creative and learn about the fascinating world of microbiology. Hosted by our team at Oxford University’s Modernising Medical Microbiology, this competition offers a fun and educational way to engage with science.
How to Enter: To participate, simply draw a microbe or design your own imaginative version! Once your masterpiece is ready, send it along with your name/initials, the microbe’s name, and your age to @bashthebug on Instagram or email us at crookpm@ndm.ox.ac.uk. Make sure to submit your entries by June 30th, 2024.
Quick Facts About Our Bugs Up for Grabs 🦠🔍:
Pseudomonas aeruginosa: This microbe is known for its striking blue or green color under the microscope!
Escherichia coli: While some strains can cause food poisoning, most E. coli are harmless and live in your intestines, helping with digestion.
MRSA: This germ is so resistant to antibiotics it is considered a ‘superbug’ (hence the cape!).
This competition is a fantastic way to spark interest in microbiology and science. Whether you’re a parent looking for a fun educational activity for your child or a teacher seeking engaging science content for your students, this drawing competition is the perfect opportunity.
We can’t wait to see all the creative and colorful entries! Your support and participation mean the world to us, and we look forward to sharing the wonderful artwork with our community.
Stay tuned for more updates, and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, Facebook and X (@bashthebug) for the latest news and announcements.
It was half-term for schools in Oxfordshire so lots of children, parents and grandparents were in town. The Dance Mat, demonstrating how mutations always creep in when you try an copy something, was very popular as always! We had a pipetting game where you could try out pipetting into a 96-well plate (with giant couscous) as well as an investigation with clues and a public poll on how antibiotics should be improved.
We’d designed and ordered some squishy antibiotics and some (much cuter) green Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria and managed to hand out over 90 to interested people over the course of the day.
My name is Teresa Street and I’m a senior postdoctoral scientist in the Modernising Medical Microbiology (MMM) research group, part of the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, UK. MMM aims to transform how we analyse and treat infections so we can improve patient care. For the last few years, we’ve worked on studies that try to develop better ways of detecting bacterial infections and predicting antibiotic resistance using DNA sequencing.
Our latest study focused on detecting gonorrhoea in patient samples. Gonorrhoea is a common sexually transmitted infection, caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae. It is usually successfully treated with a combination of two antibiotics. Increasingly, there are more cases arising where these two antibiotics are no longer effective at treating gonorrhoea, as the bacteria has developed resistance to them. This resistance has been detected globally, making gonorrhoea a significant public health risk.
To tackle this problem, we need to be able to identify and treat infections quickly: early detection and faster treatment will help control the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains. Gonorrhoea is usually detected by collecting urine or a swab sample from patients and then growing any bacteria contained within the samples in a laboratory. If bacteria do grow, further tests can be done to identify which antibiotics will successfully kill them. Scientists also do molecular tests (PCR), which involve trying to detect DNA from the gonorrhoea bacteria. It can take a while to get the results back from all of these tests as often bacteria can take a few days to grow. A single test that could be done much faster, and which would identify both whether a gonorrhoea infection is present and which antibiotics would treat it best would allow the correct treatment for each patient to be started sooner. This, in turn, would reduce the onward transmission of gonorrhoea. This is particularly important in those cases where the bacteria is resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Recently, a molecular method called Metagenomic Sequencing, or mNGS, has shown potential as a new diagnostic test. It utilises next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to identify DNA from bacteria directly from patient samples, without needing to grow the bacteria in a laboratory first. The bacterial DNA can be identified by comparing it to a database of many known bacterial sequences, and this helps to identify the bacteria causing an infection. If we can extract enough bacterial DNA from a sample, not only can mNGS work out which type of bacteria is causing the infection, but it can also identify specific parts of its DNA that we know lead to antibiotic resistance (AMR). mNGS can also be faster than current tests, often detecting the cause of an infection and which treatments will work within a few hours. In this way we have the potential for a single test that both identifies the cause of infection and gives us information about which antibiotics will (or won’t) treat it much faster than current methods.
In a previous study we tested the ability of mNGS to detect N. gonorrhoeae directly from urine samples. We were able to detect gonorrhoea and in some cases also see some AMR determinants. mNGS can, however, sometimes be hampered by high levels of host contamination: DNA extracted from a clinical sample will contain DNA from the patient as well as from any bacteria. This limits the detection of bacterial DNA in our sequence data and makes it more difficult to identify AMR determinants. We observed this in our previous work, and so our latest study tested a method to enrich for gonorrhoea before sequencing.
We used a technique called Target Enrichment to capture any gonorrhoea DNA in our extracts before sequencing. This involves designing probes – short sequences of RNA that are complementary to specific regions of the target DNA. In this case our target DNA was the N. gonorrhoeae genome and we also focussed on known AMR determinants, including probes that match to these known sequences. By mixing the probes with DNA extracted from patient samples they will selectively hybridize, or bind, to their complementary gonorrhoea target sequences. Subsequent steps remove the unbound DNA (which we hoped would be human and any other bacterial DNA), increasing the relative abundance of the gonorrhoea DNA compared to non-target DNA in the sample. In this way we should be able to enrich for gonorrhoea over the human DNA.
We tested this enrichment method for gonorrhoea-positive urine and urethral swab samples. Our results demonstrated a substantial improvement in the proportion of DNA sequences classified as N. gonorrhoeae in comparison to the same sample without enrichment. This enhanced genome coverage enabled detection of AMR determinants in chromosomal genes that are known to confer resistance, and we were able to predict the resistance seen by the laboratory to certain antibiotics in our samples. We also tested the feasibility of multiplexing, where multiple samples were pooled, enriched and sequenced simultaneously, to improve efficiency and reduce the costs associated with enrichment and sequencing. We obtained enough genome coverage to detect AMR determinants in these samples, too.
We hope our results have shown the usefulness of enrichment for detecting gonorrhoea directly from patient samples without needing to culture it in the laboratory first. We were even able to detect an AMR determinant in a sample which did not grow in the laboratory and so didn’t have a recommendation for which antibiotic would be best to kill it. We think this really highlights the utility of mNGS for looking at infections where bacteria are difficult to grow in a laboratory.
In October 2023 I travelled to Harare, in Zimbabwe, to teach a team of scientists how to genome sequence SARS-CoV-2 using Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing. The team were taking part in a study to observe COVID infections in Zimbabwe and had a collection of over 600 samples they were keen to sequence.
I spent a week at Professor Tariro Makadzange’s Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory (part of the Charles River Medical Group), teaching the team how to prepare samples and analyse data using the Global Pathogen Analysis Service (GPAS).
Hard at work preparing samples for sequencingCelebrating starting the first SARS-CoV-2 sequencing run
I’m so grateful I got to experience scientific research outside the UK, and I couldn’t have spent the week with a friendlier, more welcoming group of people. My time in Harare also really made me appreciate the facilities we have and the things we take for granted. We don’t have thunder and lightning storms so powerful they regularly knock out our power for hours at a time; nor do we have labs that leak under the sheer volume of rain that falls. We also take our superfast Wi-Fi for granted: trying to download software and upload data at 2Mb/sec is frustrating, to say the least!
The lab (in what used to be a peanut butter factory!)
This collaboration would have seriously struggled to achieve all it did in such a short space of time without the help of Bede Constantinides. He made himself available from back home for the whole week to hold our hands through setting up the computing and guiding us through the analysis, so that I could leave the team fully self-sufficient for all their future work.
I’m pleased to report the team have now finished sequencing their 600+ sample collection and are now using ONT sequencing for other studies.
Zimbabwe is an incredible country with fantastic people, and I really hope I have the opportunity to visit again one day!
Imire Lodge Rhino and Wildlife Conservation Reserve
We are looking for new members to join our existing patient and public group and work with us to make sure that public views on how we run our research are heard and acted on.
This citizen science project is part of a larger project developing a new way of diagnosing infections resistant to antibiotics and brings together researchers from Medical Sciences, Physics and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and is funded by the Oxford Martin School.
Ten Years of Population-Level Genomic Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae Serotype Surveillance Informs Vaccine Development for Invasive Infections
From 5-7pm you can find out more about some of the projects through Science on the Sofa where Oli Moore will talk to some of scientists behind the different public engagement projects on display during the day, including our very own Carla Wright and Emma Pritchard!
You can register to attend in person, or follow the livestream, via this link.
Read the first scientific paper published in eLife. Anyone can go to the website and read it, there is no paywall.
Each image is looked at by up to 17 different citizen scientists — in this paper we show that taking the median of these classifications is both reproducible and accurate.
In fact, if you apply the criteria defined by the relevant ISO standard their results are sufficient accurate but not quite reproducible enough to qualify as an Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing device.
