Staphylococcus aureus bacteria
Late last year, Science magazine published a list of six Areas to Watch in 2012. Number 6 on the list, NASA’s Curiosity rover, recently touched down on Mars. The Higgs boson (#1) has been found, faster-than-light neutrinos (#2) have been debunked, and further developments on stem-cell metabolism (#3) and treatments for intellectual disability (#5) are in progress.
Now genomic epidemiology (#4) is approaching the public health launch pad. As Science’s editors predicted, pathogen genome sequences are being used to “determine quickly where newly emerging diseases come from, whether microbes are resistant to antibiotics, and how they are moving through a population.”
