{"id":178498,"date":"2021-12-15T07:01:54","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T12:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=178498"},"modified":"2021-12-10T13:54:58","modified_gmt":"2021-12-10T18:54:58","slug":"uconn-magazine-the-microbe-hunters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/12\/uconn-magazine-the-microbe-hunters\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Magazine: The Microbe Hunters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\" style=\"background: white; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt 0in;\"><span class=\"s1\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Georgia',serif; color: #333333;\">Life teems unseen in both the soil and the sea, waging an endless, hidden biochemical war. Students who take Patricia Rossi and Spencer Nyholm\u2019s \u201cMicrobe Hunters\u201d class, however, can witness it firsthand.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"background: white; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt 0in;\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Georgia',serif; color: #333333;\"><span class=\"s1\"><span style=\"box-sizing: border-box;\">Discovering the microbiological world can transform a person. Nyholm grew up on the ocean in Southern California, fishing for sand dabs and rockfish. He loved inspecting bits of what he caught under his dad\u2019s microscope, and thought he wanted to be a doctor. But some volunteer work cured him of that notion, and it was in a marine biology class that he found his true calling.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\" style=\"background: white; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt 0in;\"><span class=\"s1\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Georgia',serif; color: #333333;\">Both Rossi\u2019s parents were middle school teachers, and she\u2019d always wanted to follow in their footsteps. Then in college, as a biology\/English major who also thought she was on her way to medical school, a microbiology class caught her up in the mystique of the tiny.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\" style=\"background: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; widows: 2; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; word-spacing: 0px; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt 0in;\"><span style=\"box-sizing: border-box;\"><span class=\"s1\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Georgia',serif; color: #333333;\">\u201cThere\u2019s so much stuff you can\u2019t see with the naked eye, yet they impact us so much,\u201d she says. Rossi has a favorite picture she likes to show students of\u00a0<i style=\"box-sizing: border-box;\">Borrelia burgdorferi,<\/i>\u00a0a bacteria with an elegantly spiral form. It causes Lyme disease. Some of the tiny stuff is beautiful. Some is deadly. All of it can amaze.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/magazine.uconn.edu\/2021\/10\/14\/mcb-2612-microbe-hunters\/\">Read on for more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A coveted class explores the unseen life all around us <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":178499,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2235,102],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1899],"class_list":["post-178498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-magazine"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 00:56:32","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178500,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178498\/revisions\/178500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/178499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178498"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=178498"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=178498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}