Mitochondria evolved from an ancestral alpha proteobacterium. However, present day mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNA) from plants and animals are very different. ... What different selective pressures might have led to these two vastly different evolutionary outcomes?
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Talmudic Question #204
TWiM 287: When Replicas Do Not Replicate
TWiM investigates the high variability in the rate and amount of current production from microbial fuel cells, and how bacteria link their growth rate to external nutrient conditions via a protein that functions as a cellular rheostat.
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Honey Bee Social Immunity
by Roberto
Flying insects are key to the functioning of many ecosystems, where they play numerous important roles such as pollination. Thus, the sharp decline in their numbers is cause for great concern. From a human perspective, the observed demise of many honey bee (Apis mellifera) populations is particularly troubling because of their critical role in the food chain.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to... Flagellar Tips
by Christoph
The same frontispiece twice within a few days at STC? No, not quite. It's not about Roberto's hitchhiking phage this time, or the flagellated bacterium, or the hitchhiking spore, but about the tip of the flagellum (black, left). Disclosure: already back in 2020, I talked with Alise, who created the image, and three other passionate science illustrators...
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Phage as Hitchhiker
by Roberto
When I started graduate school at UCSD in the mid-1970s, I sometimes found myself hitchhiking at dawn along the Pacific Coast from Solana Beach to the lab. There were some wild rides! Which is probably why some years later, as they crossed my path, I was attracted both to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and (in biology) to the evolutionary and ecological concepts of hitchhiking.
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Mycorrhizae and Land Plants – An Update
by Roberto
I am fortunate that among the first impressions of my day, I take in this view of land plants. Given my proclivity for microbiology my mind inevitably wonders to what I cannot see, the underground network of filamentous fungi connecting the roots of those plants, the mycorrhizae.
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TWiM 286: Integrons and Invasion
TWiM investigates the high variability in the rate and amount of current production from microbial fuel cells, and how bacteria link their growth rate to external nutrient conditions via a protein that functions as a cellular rheostat.
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The Chemical Ecology of Colibactin
by Roberto
Microbial genotoxic compounds – molecules that damage DNA – are found aplenty in nature. Doxorubicin and bleomycin come to mind; powerful DNA damaging agents developed as anti-cancer therapeutics but whose extreme toxicity is part of what makes some cancer chemotherapies arduous and risky.
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Pictures Considered #59: Inside a Choanoflagellate
by Roberto
Choanoflagellates (endearingly referred to as "choanos") are the closest living relative of animals and as such they can provide insights into the evolution of animal multicellularity. Interestingly, at least two choano developmental features are induced by bacterial products.
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TWiM 285: How plague got deadly
TWiM reveals a new type of satellite virus that requires only phage tails for producing infectious virus particles, and that highly virulent plague bacteria differs from its innocuous enteric predecessor by its resistance to lysis by human complement.
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