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A warning from Fleming

Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were awarded the Nobel prize in 1945 for the discovery of Penicillin, the world’s first broad-spectrum antibiotic. Very early in the discovery, they …

Introduction to Week 3

Adam and Josie introduce week 3 of the course, where we will learn about the challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Disease detective: scenario

Now it’s your chance to test your skills as a disease detective. Over the past 9 months there have been six cases of a rare respiratory pathogen in a hospital. …

Case study: A hospital outbreak of MRSA

Infectious diseases can spread quickly in a hospital environment, particularly if the pathogen that causes the disease is resistant to the drugs relied on to fight it. Genomics might be …

Genomics and the plague

Many of you will have heard of the Black Death, it was one of the biggest pandemics in human history and it was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Amazingly, …

Case study on infection forensics

Phylogenetic trees of bacteria are built using molecular data, often using gene sequences or whole genomes. When investigating a possible outbreak, the phylogeny can be used to explore the evolutionary …

Phylogenetic trees

Phylogenetic trees are depictions of the estimated evolutionary relationships between taxa – these can be organisms, species, strains or even genes. Phylogenetic trees can be used to define relationships between …

How outbreaks are investigated using molecular typing

In this video, Josie interviews Julian Parkhill about different molecular typing methods, including whole-genome sequencing. They discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different typing methods, and the difference that having …