Small Things Considered

Talmudic Question #75

What would the world be like without the Archaea?

Talmudic Question #74

by Welkin Johnson

Do the seven strategies in the Baltimore scheme of viral replication represent all possible ways of being a virus? Have other strategies fallen by the evolutionary wayside?

Talmudic Question #73

Note:  Please note today's date.

If people go to heaven does their microbiome go with them?

Ramy Aziz, Merry, and Elio already provided some imagined responses.

An answer from Rome:  Only microbes that don't engage in immoral horizontal gene transfer or illegitimate recombination.

A moralist’s answer:  Each microbe will be judged by her actions. Did she produce more energy than waste products?

A Jewish answer:  Why not?

A Protestant answer:  Depends on their denomination.

A Hindu answer:  Better sequence the microbiome's genomes in order to detect changes upon reincarnation.

A Taoist answer:   Host and microbiome are equal in the eyes of the Tao. The ten thousand things are all manifestations of the Tao.

A Pantheist answer:  Only pangenomes get in.

The Microbiota's answer:  Aren't we there already?

Talmudic Exobiology Redux

Source.

We recently asked this Talmudic Question as our TQ #71:

As NASA’s hotshot exobiologist, you are asked to design an Earth satellite system in which some organism(s) can live actively (i.e.. no spores) for millennia. How would you go about it? Specify an orbit of your choice.

Ami Bachar replied:

I would take a clean coca cola bottle, fill it half with soil and half with sea water, and make sure it stays liquid for the next 1000 years. "Everything is everywhere and the environment selects" (Martinus Beijerinck) + "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" (John Lennon). If it is well closed and nothing escape from the bottle than there should be enough of everything needed to sustain life for much longer than a millennia.

To which I (Elio) replied: The simplicity of your proposal wins out over all the complex schemes that I had dreamt up. Good for you!

It turns out that I jumped the gun. It's not so simple, as fellow blogger Russell Neches insightfully pointed out.

by Russell Neches

Feeling a bit giddy with sleep deprivation (and the first successful run on our lab's new sequencing machine), I decided to take a crack at Talmudic Question #71:

As NASA's hotshot exobiologist, you are asked to design an Earth satellite system in which some organism(s) can live actively (i.e., no spores) for millennia. How would you go about it? Specify an orbit of your choice.

Ami Bachar gamely suggested entrusting a cargo of seawater and dirt to a Coca Cola bottle, and lobbing it into orbit. I liked this idea so much that I couldn't resist embroidering it.

Talmudic Question #72

Suppose a marine bacterium evolved the perfect phage defense, one that no phage could overcome. A thousand years hence, what changes would you expect to see in the marine microbial community?

Talmudic Question #71

As NASA’s hotshot exobiologist, you are asked to design an Earth satellite system in which some organism(s) can live actively (i.e.. no spores) for millennia. How would you go about it? Specify an orbit of your choice.

Talmudic Question #70

Do you think that all bacteria are lysogens?

Talmudic Question #69

by Ramy Aziz

Is there anything microbes cannot do?

Talmudic Question #68

by Mike Rust

Why have the bacterial signaling systems based on histidine and aspartate phosphorylation been abandoned (with some exceptions) in favor of serine/threonine and tyrosine phosphorylation in eukaryotes?  Is this just a "frozen accident" or is there a deep biochemical reason?”

Talmudic Question #67

Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, said: It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! To take him up on it, imagine a microscope that lets you observe single molecules in a living cell at one Angström resolution. What's the first thing you would do with it?