Weekly PLoS ONE News and Blog Round-up

We’ve summarised below some of the latest PLoS ONE articles that have caught the interest of the media and the blogosphere in the past few days.

Oliver Maddocks and colleagues at the Universities of Edinburgh and Maryland reported earlier this week the discovery that a strain of E. coli (enteropathogenic E. coli, or EPEC) may be linked to colon cancer. The article shows that EPEC bacteria attach closely to the colon cells and insert several proteins into them, inactivating the cells’ repair system. The researchers caution, however, that their findings are preliminary and that they hope their study will lead to further research into the causes of colon cancer. There was a range of coverage of this study in the UK, including: the BBC News, the Press Association, the Herald and Nursing Times.

There also been some further coverage of several articles published in PLoS ONE last week. Christopher Stallings’s paper on the decline of predatory fish populations in coral reefs in the Caribbean was featured in a National Geographic news story. An article by Gerardo Suzán and colleagues, meanwhile, analysing the role of small-mammal species diversity in reducing the transmission of animal pathogens among wildlife hosts, was highlighted in Conservation Magazine’s Journal Watch column.

Finally, New Scientist picked up a PLoS ONE article published earlier this year by research team based in France and Viet Nam. Christophe Guilmoto and colleagues used demographic and statistical tools to analyse Viet Nam’s sex ratio at birth (male births per 100 female births), which, they report, has increased in recent years.

From the Other PLoS Journals

In a recent PLoS Medicine article, Radek Bukowski and colleagues describe an association between taking folic acid supplements and a reduction in the risk of preterm birth. There has been coverage of the study in the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and Reuters.