Small Things Considered

Mining the Proteome

by Merry Youle  
If you had oodles of proteomes at your disposal, what sorts of questions might you ask? A group of Polish investigators classified the proteins in 1784 (!) proteomes based on their isoelectric point and found some interesting correlations... Read more →

Calling All Teachers

by Elio  
As the school year begins, we would like to hear from you about uses that you may have for this blog in your class­room. We think that the material here lends itself particularly well to use as supplemental readings ─ providing intellectual enrichment to students who desire it. The blog has been mentioned in class... Read more →

Rearranging the Furniture

by Elio  
Now that nearly a hundred posts reside in our archives, it is high time to reassign them to new categories─categories based on the topic considered. Look at the new list displayed in the right-hand column of the blog. Because of... Read more →

E. coli in Good Spirits

by Merry Youle  
There is something both endearing and enduring about E. coli. Just when you think that all kinds of other fascinating bugs are about to give it a shove into history, news emerges of its renewed importance. This time, it's biofuels... Read more →

Visiting Rome, Dried Figs, and Streptomycetes

by Elio  
One of our favorite microbiological blogs (Twistedbacteria) is devoted to the actinomycetes. A July 12 post called "Rome, Dried Figs, and Streptomycetes" highlights an article purporting that dried figs from Herculaneum were a health food for the inhabitants... Read more →

A Bacterial Mouth

By guest author Mark Martin  
This tale begins with Elio's Talmudic Question #3: Why are no bacterial pathogens known to use a Bdellovibrio-type of mechanism to penetrate into eukaryotic cells? Since I have done a little work with predatory prokaryotes, this subject particularly interests me. We are only now starting to understand how Bdellovibrio obtains entry into that... Read more →

Sprezzatura in the Lab

by Elio  
Sprezzatura is a term from the Italian Renaissance that denotes the art of making the difficult look easy, a kind of non-chalance. Examples are the Mona Lisa or Michael Jordan at work. In science, some extraordinarily difficult experiments are made to look easy when described in a paper. But we are... Read more →

Microbial Endocrinology: A Coming of Age

by Elio  
If you stick around long enough, you recognize a rhythm in science as old motifs resurface every now and then, gain prominence for a while, and then fade away. In my mind, tantalizing examples from the tides of Medical Microbiology include the elusive role of microbes in chronic diseases, the indications of... Read more →

A New Photosynthetic Player

by Elio  
A recent article in Science describes the identification of a novel photosynthetic bacterium in springs in Yellowstone Park. Its presence within the phototrophic microbial mats was detected by metagenomic analysis. This bacterium does not belong to any of the five phyla previously known to have chlorophyll-driven photosynthetic ability... Read more →

Plants and Animals Converse with Microbes in the Same Language

by Elio  
We've eavesdropped before on the intimate chemical conversations between pathogens and their invaded hosts. Some plant-bacterium interactions are especially well known, such as those between plants and crown-gall bacteria or nitrogen-fixing rhizobia. What escaped our attention was... Read more →