In a potential game changer for the health care industry, a new cell phone app and lab kit now allow a smartphone to identify bacteria from patients anywhere in the world. With the new app, doctors will be able to diagnose diseases and prescribe the appropriate antibiotic within a one-hour office visit, meaning faster recovery — and lower treatment costs — for patients. Developed by a research team led by MCDB professor Michael Mahan, the study “Smartphone-based pathogen diagnosis in urinary sepsis patients” was published in the journal EbioMedicine.  The detection system succeeded in achieving rapid diagnosis of urinary tract infections — among the most common type of infection globally. The app uses a smartphone’s camera to measure a chemical reaction and determines a diagnosis in about an hour — and the simple, low-cost test can be performed in the world’s most remote locations.  

Like many first-year biology majors, Mirna Aparicio came to UC Santa Barbara with the goal of becoming a doctor. What she didn’t anticipate was how different university courses were from those she took in high school. She found help honing her study skills through an innovative program at UCSB designed to increase the success and retention of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) majors. Funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the BioMentors program aims to change the freshman and sophomore experience for undergraduate biology majors. And it has been very successful, particularly among underperforming, first-generation and underrepresented minority (URM) students. 

Calcium is something of a double-edged sword. Too much of the essential element is as dangerous as too little, either case adversely affecting health in animals from humans to mice to fruit flies. Sensing calcium at all can be crucial.

Food poisoning may be the unwanted gift that keeps on giving — at least according to a new study. A startling discovery by UC Santa Barbara scientists, published today in the journal Science, reveals how a past history of bacterial infections adds up with age to cause severe inflammatory disease.

Small bacterial infections, which may go unnoticed and which clear the body without treatment — such as occurs in mild food poisoning — nevertheless can start a chain of events that leads to chronic inflammation and life-threatening colitis. The new findings also may identify the long-mysterious origins of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

The project was led by Jamey Marth, director of UCSB’s Center for Nanomedicine and also a professor at the Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla. Additional collaborators were lead author Won Ho Yang, Michael Mahan, Douglas Heithoff and Peter Aziz, who hold joint appointments at UCSB’s Center for Nanomedicine and the SBP Discovery Institute, and Dr. Victor Nizet of UC San Diego and Markus Sperandio of Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich.

“We have discovered an environmental and pathogenic origin of chronic intestinal inflammation in the course of modeling human food poisoning as it occurs repeatedly over the adult lifespan,” co-author Marth explained. “Remarkably, salmonellae have figured out a way to disrupt a previously unknown protective mechanism in the gut that normally prevents intestinal inflammation.”