Tuberculosis remains a global health problem. Making it easier and quicker to identify which antibiotics an infection is likely to be susceptible to will be a key part of the solution. Whilst whole-ge...

When patients suffer infections related to replaced knee or hip joints, medical teams need to know which bacteria are causing the problem. A promising new method called metagenomic sequencing reads all the DNA in a sample and can identify bacteria without needing them to grow in the lab. This could be faster than standard tests, and might give more complete information.

Last week the MMM Unit held a plant sale to raise some money for Oxford Hospitals Charity. The work had started some weeks before with lots of propagation of spider plants and sourcing of paper coffee pots (so we didn't have to buy any plastic pots). The stall was staffed all day -- by Katie Hopkins and Valentina Pennetta in the photo -- and a grand total of £212 was raised. It's the first year we've run an event like this and the team are already looking forward to next year!

You can listen to our very own Dr Bernadette Young talking about fluoroquinolones -- these are a very valuable and widely-used class of antibiotics -- on Episode 32 of the Communicable podcast. This prestigious podcast is published by the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) and hence is aimed at clinicians so will be technical and detailed, you have been warned!

Bash The Bug (@BashTheBug) / X

Dot Nagy, one of our DPhil students, has written a great blog post about how she and others have got the rest of us in the Unit thinking more about how to reduce the environmental impact of our research.

Dorottya Nagy writes about the experiences from the Modernising Medical Microbiology (MMM) Unit research group on engaging wet lab, computer lab, and office teams on the sustainability agenda.

We have to keep most of our biological samples at -80°C which is much colder than the -20°C you'll find (hopefully) inside your freezer in the kitchen. This does require a lot of electricity. Valentina put in an application to the Freezer Challenge and we came 19th out of 115 teams and won a Recognition Award! By increasing the temperature slightly on our freezers we estimate we will save 48kWh each day which is enough to boil an astonishing 436 litres of water.

Throughout the past three days doing work experience at MMM we’ve learnt about the different roles within the department, their responsibilities and contributions to research. After being briefed a…

This year, our group has achieved Silver in the Green Impact award - a sustainability scheme which supports teams who want to improve their sustainability efforts. As part of the scheme, you are given a toolkit with lots of different activities to complete which encourages people to think more about their environmental impact. Each task is assigned a point value, and you need to collect a specific number of points to achieve Bronze, Silver, Gold and Beyond Gold.

We ran a session at the Philosophy in Pubs Oxford group in April 2024, discussing where the moral lines can and should be drawn around the use of data about us. Who does the data really belong to? What are legitimate uses of it? What are the factors that make people uncomfortable? And are they justified? We had a very interesting discussion with around 16 people from the local Oxfordshire area, covering questions such as “Does the idea of the public good ever outweigh an individual's right to control how their data is used?”, “Is it correct that any data that is “about” us also "belongs" to us, even if we did not create it, nor have any use for it ourselves?”, and “Does it change things if the data is completely anonymised or is there still a general rule about self determination that applies?”

This is the third year that the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) held its Showcase at the popular Westgate Shopping Centre in the centre of Oxford. Like last year it was held jointly with the NIHR Oxford Health BRC. Our research software engineers had redesigned and rewritten our dance mat game so now you took on the role of a doctor firing different coloured antibiotics at incoming bacteria.