Tag: Interview

Over the last week, I have been featured in media in different ways, so here’s a quick summary.

I was asked to provide a comment on a recent paper on how microplastics affect antibiotic resistance development (1) for an article in Scientific American (2). I am not sure I had that much intelligent to say, other than to caution about jumping to conclusions, as we still know quite little about the risks associated with microplastics and AMR: “How much of a threat plastic-derived drug-resistant pathogens pose to humans is a question that remains to be fully understood” is one of my two quotes from the article.

I also was interviewed last week for Swedish Radio’s Vetenskapsradion (in Swedish) about another study showing that, e.g., ibuprofen could drive bacteria to higher mutation rates, indirectly triggering antibiotic resistance development (3). Such interaction effects have also been seen elsewhere (4), but the fact that they see this effect for such a commonly used drug as ibuprofen – one of our most standard painkillers – is a little bit concerning. Still I stress in the interview that we need to know much more about these interaction effects before jumping to clinical guidance.

Finally, the Foundation for Strategic Research has released the video they recorded about our research last fall. It is in Swedish, but with English subtitles, so this could be worth a watch!

References

1. Gross N, Muhvich J, Ching C, Gomez B, Horvath E,Nahum Y, Zaman MH: Effects of microplastic concentration, composition, and size on Escherichia coli biofilm-associated antimicrobial resistance. Appl Environ Microbiol, 91, e02282-24, (2025). https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.02282-24
2. Zaraska M: Microplastics Could Be Turning Bacteria into Drug-Resistant Superbugs. Scientific American, 2025-08-26. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/microplastics-could-be-creating-dangerous-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria/
3. Chen H, Sapula SA, Turnidge J, et al.: The effect of commonly used non-antibiotic medications on antimicrobial resistance development in Escherichia coli. npj Antimicrob Resist 3, 73 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44259-025-00144-w
4. Maier L, Pruteanu M, Kuhn M, et al.: Extensive impact of non-antibiotic drugs on human gut bacteria. Nature 555, 623–628 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25979

As part of a series highlighting the research at the Institute of Biomedicine, I was a few weeks a go interviewed about the research in the lab and my history. This interview has now been published on the department website, both in Swedish and English. I think it is a pretty nice read and a good introduction to our work and why we do what we do. Could make for a good weekend read!

Here’s a nice popular summary of the paper that I published with Emil Burman last month on how temperature affects the microbial model community THOR. I think Miles Martin at The Academic Times did a great distilling my ramblings into a coherent story. Good job Miles!

I did not know about The Academic Times before this but will keep an eye on this relatively new publication aiming to popularize and distill scientific content for other scientists.

In other popularization-of-science-news, I got interviewed last week by New Scientist about a very exciting paper that came out this week on travelers picking up antibiotic resistance genes in Africa and Asia. The study was quite similar to what we did back in 2015, but used a much larger data set and uncovered that there are many, many more resistance genes that are enriched after travel than what we found using our more limited dataset. Very cool study, and you can read the New Scientist summary here.