Anne Estes

I always tell my students that bacteria are bad at math - they multiply to divide. *groan*. This and other silly stickers about serious science are up on my RedBubble site. mostlymicrobes.redbubble.com. Need bulk orders for #scicomm? LMK. #stickers 🧪🦠🍎

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Happy birthday to #botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), 🧪👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci renown algae expert, celebrated seaweed cook, devoted teacher and mentor, expert on Hawaiian ethnobotany, the first Indigenous Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science and the first woman or person of colour to become 🧵

Towson University Dept Biological Sciences is hiring! Full-time, tenure track, 9-month Assistant Professor - plant or algal biology, lichenology, or mycology. Preferred start date is August 2027. More information: : towson.taleo.net/careersectio... 🧪🦠🔬

Excellent talk today by @berondam.bsky.social at Towson Univ! I've always been inspired by her #lessonsfromplants and #lessonsfrommicrobes. Appreciate her message that environment matters for mentoring at all career stages.

Here's hoping that #MarylandDay goes well for the UMD Microbiome Center as they are giving out our silly stickers!

🧪 #measles #vaccination Thanks for posting this @jennifernuzzo.bsky.social 😢 This is a gift link, free to read, in case some people can’t read the whole thing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...

The misogyny of the Trump administration is palpable… #MedSky 🧪

How every layer of science's "self-correcting machinery" failed when Iva Veseli and I simply wanted to reproduce the findings of a high-profile study on gut microbiome and autism: merenlab.org/2026/04/15/u...

New paper: Some things to consider when you want to use old samples of flowers from herbaria to make inferences about changes in flowering onset over time (or similar). Had a blast building some Bayesian models for this. Thx David and Daniel for letting me help doi.org/10.1111/nph.... 1/2

#OnThisDay in 1862, Louis Pasteur demonstrated that gently heating liquids could prevent spoilage! This experiment laid the foundation for pasteurization, a process that transformed food safety and continues to protect public health today. 🧪

Tonight's @asm.org MD Branch meeting - Rodney Rohde talking about reemerging pathogens

Little migrating songbirds are performing one of the most stunning behaviors on the planet-- some are flying from Brazil to Canada, overnight. When they stop to rest they are exhausted and vulnerable. Protect them by keeping cats inside! It helps cats too! abcbirds.org/solutions/ke...

God bless Bruce

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Have you developed a new #bioinformatics tool to understand #phage or #virus? Make sure you add it to #awesome-virome github.com/shandley/awe...

On schedule now for #MattersMicrobial: podcast releases every other Tuesday. This week, Dr. Nahui Medina-Chavez (of the Michael Travisano lab) joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss halophilic archaea and evolution in the lab. Please spread the #GoodMicrobialWord?? youtu.be/oz04oGDiRY0?...

Why do we live in such a childish, stupid country? A country that wastes its money on useless billion dollar aircraft carriers, when it could be spending those tax dollars to actually help its citizens like sane countries.

"The greatest danger to our future is apathy." -- Jane Goodall, born #OTD 1934

Dr. Leila Denmark co-developed the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine in 1932. She was the world's oldest practicing pediatrician until she retired at age 103 (practicing for 73 years). She died a supercentenarian #OTD in 2012 at the age of 114 years and 60 days. #WomenInSTEM

In Gen Micro we "swab something". I encourage students to swab 👟b/c the diversity is fabulous! Here's a sticker dedicated to all the diversity we find on our plates. 🍎🦠🧪As a mom-scientist it's the diversity of things that is sometimes a bit much! At my RedBubble site: mostlymicrobes.redbubble.com

New Book Review up! Breaking Through: My Life In Science by Katalin Kariko. An inspirational story of an unconventional scientist who created the COVID19 mRNA vaccine. For anyone who doesn't fit into the status quo. @asm.org 🦠🧪🍎https://www.mostlymicrobes.com/brbreaking_through/

@markowenmartin.bsky.social thanks so much for the dung beetle and brood ball kits!! You are too kind. The girls and I will have a ton of fun.

How Bacteria Die in the Microbial Marine Forest Dr. Anne Thompson explores her research on salps, some of the most abundant animals in the ocean, and how their feeding mechanisms shape marine microbial food webs and carbon cycles. @markowenmartin.bsky.social

5/6 For anyone worried about synthetic vs "natural" compounds, synthetics are often purer, more stable, & engineered to be more effective and SAFER than "natural" compounds. So do what's right for your baby, get them the vitamin K they need, prevent VKDB, and avoid risk of fatal brain bleeds. 🍎⚛️🧪🧬👩‍🔬🥽

6/6 here's a helpful resource: Oh and talk to your doctor about the hepatitis B vaccine for your baby as well. The fact I had to sign a waiver in order to get the vaccine for my baby because of the current misinformation is sad. 🥽👩‍🔬🧬🧪⚛️🍎 health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultiva...

This is the sort of strategic planning that should go into #vaccine design 💉 They analysed 1,930 #Klebsiella pneumoniae 🦠🧫🧬 neonate blood isolates from 13 countries and estimate that 20 antigens 🧪 could cover 72.9% of all infections for 5–10 years #IDSky #EpiSky journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

A rescue puppy is to become one of only a handful of dogs in the world able to detect a multi-drug resistant lung infection. Chilli is being trained to identify the scent of pseudomonas aeruginosa, a major cause of lung damage in cystic fibrosis. 🧪🐕🦠 @medsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Join #MVIF 46 cassyni.com/s/mvif-46 and #MeetTheSpeakers @jeremyjbarr.bsky.social will discuss isolation, engineering and ecology of temperate phages from the human gut!

Breast milk isn't just nutrition – it delivers live bacterial strains that colonize the infant gut and persist for months. Happy to share our new paper, where we used metagenomics to track bacterial strains between 195 mother-infant pairs over the first 6 months of life: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Book review of Microbes:The Unseen Agents of Climate Change is up on the blog - rb.gy/wchw8f. Really love this book and will use for Environmental Microbiology!

🧵 1/7 #AltComms MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) this week on a Zika outbreak in Bangladesh in 2024 This is classic, boots-on-the-ground epidemiology—and exactly why it still matters. Let’s dig in.

As you partake of bread and beer - give thanks for Saccharomyces cerevisiae! Yeast ferments sugar into alcohol. The CO2 given off is what helps bread rise. Each semester we do a Fermentation Feast in class to "taste the diversity of cultures". Microbiology - the field full of sensory delights :)

This student for "Thank a Microbe" really loved Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus. Predatory bacteria are easy to love! It bores its way into another bacterium, digests the bacterium, then reproduces, with its babies breaking out of the empty shell of the bacterial prey.

Today's student Thank a Microbe post features Pseudomonas putida! Need to clean up oil spills and other toxic hydrocarbons? Call in P. putida.

For the Thank a Microbe project, Lactobacillus sp. were a favorite genera of bacteria to thank. Lactobacillus acidophilus is what digests milk sugars into acetic acid, which gives yogurt its tangy taste!