Welcome to Small Things Considered! This blog shares the excitement of unexpected and unusual stories of the microbial world. The main contributors to this blog are listed on your right. But we do not just publish our own content, we have many contributions from students, postdocs, and others. We enjoy this, in part because theirs is a world where scientific communication will increasingly involve social media. And this blog is a social medium. Don’t think that we do this to avoid work. We are dedicated editors who spend a lot of time going over the material we receive. We are eager to hear from you, so send us your comments, criticisms, submissions, ideas, or whatever else comes into your mind. Thank you for visiting.
The establishment of an oxygen-respiring bacterium in the cytoplasm of an archeon might have given rise to the eukaryotes. What was the first adaptive trait...
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by Christoph "Light funky groove with a rolling snare pattern and occasional fills, syncopated wood block and percussive hand‑drum and rolling conga pattern" describes a particular drum pattern (#15) by acclaimed Nigerian master drummer Tony Allen. But don't worry, you didn't stumble into the drums section...
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by Christoph Our ability to visually perceive and discriminate is always slighly overwhelmed by black-and-white images. Especially, of course, when the objects depicted are outside our trained, familiar size spectrum, such as bacterial cells and their innards. Take for example Figure 1, the cryo-ET image of a tiny...
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by Christoph Microbiologists study microbes with microscopes because they are not visible to the naked eye. Unless they are. This was exactly the case for "Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica", described in a recent BioRχiv preprint by Vollard et al. (2022): "A centimeter-long bacterium with DNA compart..." (more about the second part of the title...
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by Davide Ciccarese This image I captured of a result of mine reminds me of how important it is to keep one's mind open and let the results speak for themselves, even after making a mistake. As part of my research I was conducting during my PhD with David Johnson and Dani Or, I was interested in studying...
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by Christoph I had almost solved the twisted nails puzzle in the first part. I had untwisted the function of the first nail, spot 42 RNA, as well as the function of the second nail, the open reading frame contained within this 'dual‑function RNA' that is translated as the SpfP protein. Here now are two more twists…
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by Janie Here's a fun way to get little ones interested in microbiology. In Wonderful World of the Small: A First Book of Microbiology, Lindsey Millar and Vivien Sárkány introduce the diversity of microbes on Earth. They present an anthropomorphized cast of different types of microbes...
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by Christoph I recently mentioned in passing that "...one is poking a wasps' nest when studying cAMP·CRP regulated genes." Are you ready to do some poking with me? Well, in a back corner of said wasp's nest lies a twisted nails puzzle, the solution to which I will reveal here. You would be right...
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by Elio In the beginning of this gorgeous and intellectually fulfilling book, Britt tells us that, due to modern technology, fungi are now known to be "more ubiquitous than we thought" and are "much more important to the environment and, by extension, to ourselves." He proceeds to justify these statements...
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by Roberto I had a dream. I believe it was greatly influenced by a paper I read recently. It describes the fungal populations and the metabolomics of Corvina grapes (Vitis vinifera L. cv. Corvina). For those of you not deeply steeped in winemaking, Corvina grapes serve as the staple for...
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The purpose of this blog is to share our appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet. We will emphasize the unusual and the unexpected phenomena for which we have a special fascination... (more)