Mycobacterium

A wild green iguana in Costa Rica.Image: Galyna Andrushko (Shutterstock)Welcome to another installment of Gizmodo’s Animal Crime of the Week. Last week, we admired the trash-stealing parrots of Australia. This week features a bitey, cake-stealing iguana that added injury to insult by giving its victim a nasty, rare infection.Alex Winter on the Most Important Modern Horror Movie This weird tale comes from a case report published by Stanford University doctors last April. A 3-year-old girl and her family were vacationing in…

A 3-year-old girl’s holiday in Costa Rica was ruined by an iguana in more ways than one. The scaly reptile stole her cake, but not before biting her hand and transmitting a rare bacterial infection that endured for months, according to the girl’s doctors. Fortunately, the infection was treatable.Won’t Virtual Reality Make Me Sick?The unusual case will be presented later this month by doctors at the annual European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, but details were made available to the public…

Photo by CDC on UnsplashIn this post I’m going to review a recent paper in the interface between medicine research and modeling and machine learning. The paper, Green, A.G., Yoon, C.H., Chen, M.L. et al. A convolutional neural network highlights mutations relevant to antimicrobial resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Nat Commun 13, 3817 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31236-0 , describes two approaches to training neural network models for predicting the resistance of a given M. tuberculosis (MTB) strain,…