by Roberto — The O-side chains of lipopolysaccharides (LPS), the outer most feature of most Gram-negative's outer membrane, are highly variable in terms of their chain length and chemical composition. In my last post, I described how the O-side chain of some bacterial strains serve as a settlement and metamorphosis cue for a marine invertebrate. My thoughts immediately took me to this question: What was the early evolutionary history of O-side chain variability? Read more →
Larval Settlement
by Roberto — Animals originate, evolve, and undergo development in a microbial world. A beautiful example of how animal development is guided by bacterial chemical cues is the metamorphosis of the bottom dwelling marine worm Hydroides elegans. Read more →
Extreme ORFs
by Roberto — If you were to plot the frequency of all known open reading frames (ORFs) as a function of the number codons they contain you'd see a broad distribution showing an average of about three hundred codons and a long tail of very long ORFs. Just for fun, what are the very end points of the graph? What is the longest ORF known? And the shortest? Read more →
Fungus Helps Carnivorous Plant Digest Prey
by Kevin Blake — It is well-established that microorganisms help vertebrates digest food, such as the bacteria in our gut breaking down complex carbohydrates. But do carnivorous plants engage in similar digestive collaborations? Read more →
Searching for ΦX174
The search for ΦX174 was the task that our fellow blogger naturepoker set himself some time ago. His search was not in some largely forgotten and iced-over box in the back corner of a –80°C freezer. Instead, he searched the literature as to when and where this bacteriophage was first described. Naturepoker has recorded the result of this sleuthing... Read more →
...rosette is a rosette. (3|3)
by Christoph — Among the Alphaproteobacteria, a number of species from phylogenetically distantly related orders are known for forming rosettes during growth. Despite commonalities, they all have their own peculiarities when it comes to the first cell‑cell contact(s) during "rosetting". Phaeobacter inhibens (order Rhodobacterales) cells attach to each other by their "sticky ends" at one pole... Read more →
...rosette is a rosette is a... (2|3)
by Christoph — I like to imagine that microscopists in the late 19th century who looked at water samples were happily surprised when they saw organized structures of cell clusters in the whole tangle of protists and bacteria, which they then liked to call “rosettes” because these were structures known from botany. And on closer inspection, it turned out that some of them were actually bacterial rosettes… Read more →
Rosette is a rosette is a... (1|3)
by Christoph — I dare say that every biologist was blown away when they, a decade ago or so, first saw pictures of spherical rosettes that choanoflagellates can and readily do form. Is this emergent multicellularity? Skilled microscopists had long been aware of such "rosettes" among (some) bacteria, but they never made it into the canon of bacterial shapes as they only form under certain growth conditions. Read more →
Pictures Considered #63: Images Can Shape Us
by Roberto — It used to be that, when I closed my eyes and thought back, searching for a defining moment that sparked my life-long passion for molecular biology, this image came vividly to mind. Most memories lie buried, coming back only mysteriously, and often without cue. This one, though, is clear. Read more →
How E. coli Rose to Prominence – An Addendum
by Roberto — In an era of microbiology largely dominated by research surrounding previously unimaginable extent of microbial diversity, here at STC we still have a strong affection for the advances made investigating model bacteria; prime amongst these is E. coli. Thus, it is no surprise that we are fascinated by the history of E. coli research. Read more →