A comeback for antibiotic cycling?

Christiane Goulart and Miriam Barlow and colleagues have published an important study in this month’s PLOS One entitled “Designing Antibiotic Cycling Strategies by Determining and Understanding Local Adaptive Landscapes.” Because of the growing...

Evolutionary Erosion of Anti-Microbial Magic

In the early years of the last century, Paul Ehrlich coined the term “magic bullet” to indicate a therapeutic agent that targeted an infectious agent or tumor with exquisite specificity (Schwartz, 2004).  He was inspired by his work with antibodies to imagine a future...

A Medical Application of Phylogenetic Analysis

A couple of months ago, my institution hosted a one-day symposium on phylogenetics. One of the speakers was John Avise, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the individual generally credited with originating the field of phylogeography. His talk and those...