This is a collection of mini lectures created by anthropologists and those in conversation with anthropology as supplimental material to assist college and university instructors who were made to shift their courses online because of COVID19.For more information, see here.To contribute, please create an OER author account and send your name and OER registered email to AnthropologyTeaching@gmail.com.

The pork chops you buy in the supermarket neatly packaged in plastic and styrofoam may look completely sterile, but are, in fact, likely to be contaminated with disease-causing bacteria - and not with just any old bugs, but with hard-to-treat, antibiotic resistant strains. In a recently published study, researchers with the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System bought meat from a wide sampling of chain grocery stores across the country and analyzed the bacteria on the meat. Resistant microbes were found in 81% of ground turkey samples, 69% of pork chops, 55% of ground beef samples, and 39% of chicken parts.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Human gut microbes are critical for maintaining the integrity of the GI tract, immune system homeostasis, and host energy metabolism. Alterations in this network can have health consequences, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Antibiotic treatment compromises the composition of the gut microbiome, affecting microbial function and resulting in long-lasting detrimental effects on the host. A recent study examined how different antibiotics affect the ability of gut microbes to control intestinal inflammation. Researchers treated mice with antibiotics prior to fecal microbiota transplantation. They found that antibiotic pre-treatment significantly altered the ability of the microbiota to control intestinal inflammation. Streptomycin- and vancomycin-treated microbes failed to control inflammation, and pathobionts associated with IBD thrived. In contrast, microbes treated with metronidazole were able to control inflammation, and beneficial microbial species were enriched..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The period shortly after birth is a critical window for microbiome establishment. Antibiotics can impact this process, often negatively, but most of the research to date has been conducted on full-term infants and has rarely included infants that never received antibiotics, complicating the analysis. A recent study sought to close these gaps and examined the skin and gut microbiomes of preterm infants. While gestational age at birth had some influence on the maturation of the microbiome, postnatal age had a stronger impact. But brief exposure to antibiotics reversed the maturation trajectory between weeks one and three after birth, and antibiotic exposure impacted the abundance of potentially beneficial gut microbes. Some bacteria in our microbiome generate short-chain fatty acids, like butyrate and acetate, that our cells can use, but at three weeks after birth, the antibiotic-exposed infants had an altered microbiome with reduced capacity to produce these important metabolites..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antimicrobial resistance is a looming threat to global health. As a result, the livestock industry is moving away from using antibiotics in feed to enhance growth. But this shift may have led to increased rates of systemic infections and reduced production efficiency. Alternatives for antibiotic growth promotants (AGPs) are needed, but the mechanism behind the efficiency of AGPs is largely unknown. So, a recent study systematically evaluated the composition and function of the chicken gut microbial community in response to AGPs. The impact of AGPs was dependent on the birds' age and diet as well as the intestinal sampling location. Overall, AGPs had a limited impact on the abundances of specific microbial groups but did shift which groups were influential and exclude others. The chicken gut microbiome functionally responded to AGPs by changing the expression of multiple pathways, including by increasing expression of cell wall formation and antimicrobial resistance mechanism genes..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat to human and animal health, and this problem is accelerated by the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) between individual bacteria. ARGs tend to accumulate in the gut microbes of animals, and they reflect the resistome, or collection of ARGs, of the environment. Thus, one way to monitor the resistome of an environment could be sampling the gut microbiomes of animals. To that end, researchers examined the gut resistomes of two domesticated honeybee species, _Apis cerana_ and _Apis mellifera_. The resistome corresponded most strongly with the honeybee host species, rather than geographic region. The more heavily managed species, _A. mellifera_, carried the most ARGs and had the heaviest load of transferrable ARGs. However, transferrable ARGs were common in the microbiomes from both honeybee species..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotics are critical treatments for bacterial infections, but antibiotic resistance is a growing problem. Wastewater treatment plants may foster resistance development, since sewage contains both human pathogens and antibiotics or their metabolite. The activated sludge (AS) stage commonly used to treat sewage at these plants is especially microbe-rich and may encourage transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) through reproduction (vertical transfer) or movement of mobile genetic elements (horizontal transfer). To learn more, a recent study profiled ARGs and their neighboring genes at five wastewater treatment plants on three continents. Overall, ARG abundance was lower in AS than in incoming sewage (IN). In addition, ARGs tended to colocalize with plasmids and other mobile genetic elements to a greater extent in IN than AS, indicating decreased horizontal transfer potential..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem worldwide—and in outer space. Spaceflight can promote biofilm formation and antimicrobial resistance development, and astronauts are especially vulnerable to infection due to the unique demands of spaceflight. To support future space travel, it is critical to understand exactly how spaceflight affects microbial diversity and virulence. To learn more, researchers recently used a machine learning algorithm to analyze sequencing data from the Microbial Tracking (MT)-1 mission, which sampled microbes at eight locations on the International Space Station during three flights. The model predicted the presence of hundreds of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the 226 bacterial strains isolated from the flights, including strains of the potentially very pathogenic bacterium Enterobacter bugandensis and the food poisoning-related bacterium Bacillus cereus..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Resistance to antibiotics is a growing global threat to human and animal health. Much of the current research into antibiotic resistance has focused on the human gut, but significantly less of it has examined rivers, which are akin to a terrestrial ‘gut.’ To close this gap, researchers examined the antibiotic resistance genes and their hosts in the 3rd longest river in the world, the Yangtze. They identified 1853 species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that collectively carried 31 types of antibiotic resistance genes. Human pathogenic bacteria carried a disproportionately large share of the resistance genes. Specifically, human pathogens accounted for 5.9% of the host population found in the river sediment, but they carried 46% of the resistance genes there. In the water column, human pathogens carried 64% of the resistance genes while representing only 13.4% of the host population. The dominant antibiotic resistance genes differed from those found in the human gut, anthropogenic systems, or lakes..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antibiotics are powerful for fighting infection. But they could create a dangerous imbalance in the gut, where the eradication of harmful bacteria might make room for gut fungi to invade. To find out, researchers analyzed stool samples from 14 healthy participants. Samples were collected over 3 months following a 6-day course of antibiotics. While the bacterial community mostly rebounded over those 3 months, the fungal community shifted from one characterized largely by mutually beneficial interactions (red) to one fraught with competitive interactions (blue) with half of the bacterial-fungal interactions detected before the antibiotic treatment disappearing 3 months later. Metagenomics data revealed that certain bacteria normally help keep opportunistic fungal pathogens like Candida albicans in check. Understanding how could help researchers find ways to restore balance to the gut microbiome following drug treatment or during disease..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Among the many complications patients with diabetes can experience, cognitive decline is one of them. Diabetes-induced cognitive decline, or DICD, begins with damage to the central nervous system and can result in impaired learning, memory, and judgment. A recent study found that in mice with DICD, injection with the antidiabetic protein FGF1 improved cognition. In a water maze task designed to test memory, diabetic mice treated with FGF1 (db/db+FGF1) reached their goal significantly faster than untreated mice with diabetes (db/db). And the brains of untreated mice (db/db) showed more shrinkage than those of treated mice (db/db+FGF1). Further research should help clarify how FGF1 reduces symptoms of both diabetes and DICD and whether FGF1 might be an effective treatment option for patients with DICD..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Renal cancer affects over 400,000 people each year, and new treatment options are needed. A new study unraveled a paradox taking place in the immune systems of cancer patients. Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), driven by tumor cells, have the ability to suppress the immune responses of T cells, preventing T-cell recognition of tumor cells and allowing immune escape. However, mice and humans with renal tumors do not experience systemic immunosuppression. Researchers used mice to examine renal cancer-derived exosomes (RDEs), extracellular vesicles derived from tumor cells. They found that the proportion and activity of MDSCs in the spleen and bone marrow changed after internalization of RDEs. RDE-stimulated MDSCs inhibited T cell proliferation and cytotoxicity, and these effects were antigen-specific and driven by the molecule HSP70 in RDEs and TLR2 on MDSCs, explaining the targeted immunosuppression of the renal cancer-specific immune response..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.