Small Things Considered

A Most Personal Note

by Elio  
At the June General Meeting of the ASM in Boston, there was a session called From Bacterial Physiology to Cellular Genetics: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of Schaechter, Maaløe, and Kjeldgaard. The participants were Fred Neidhardt, Stephen Cooper, Amy Vollmer, and myself. Read more →

Talmudic Question #34

We may be revealing our ignorance, but we are under the impression that although there are giant bacteria, there are no giant archaea. If this is the case, why might this be so? Read more →

Your Name and Occupation?

by Jennifer Gutierrez  
How would you like to be able to ask this question of an individual bacterium in its natural habitat – and get a truthful answer? It turns out that there is a way to do just that, thanks to a cool and innovative technique called Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS). A current version, known as... Read more →

The Long Star State

by Kevin D. Young  
There is nothing new under the sun. King Solomon may be technically correct about the dearth of novelty, at least in its most general form. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be surprised, over and over, by things we’ve just discovered. For example, I would have thought that the basic shapes of bacteria... Read more →

Bloggers in Boston

by Elio  
On the occasion of the ASM General Meeting in Boston early in June, about a dozen of us interested in science blogs met for a discussion of blog-related issues. Several of the people in attendance were bloggers, notably... Read more →

The Pathogen's Guide to Profiting From the Immune System

by Elio  
Ah, that amazing innate immunity and those equally amazing ways microbes respond to it! There seems to be no end of the variations in the choreography of host and parasite. Here are two intriguing versions of that dance. Read more →

News from the Department of Mimivirology

by Elio  
Combine the new imaging techniques with the colossal and eyecatching Mimivirus, and you'd expect some stunning images. A recently published paper does not disappoint. The authors used... Read more →

The Tip of the Iceberg

by David Hopwood  
We cannot read the popular press – let alone the scientific literature – these days without realising that the resistance of dangerous pathogenic bacteria to currently used antibiotics is increasing at an alarming rate. Methicillin (or multiple) resistant S. aureus (MRSA) is the most talked about, closely followed by vancomycin resistant Enterococcus (VRE) as well as... Read more →

Talmudic Question #33

Imagine that we could completely get rid of the microbial biofilms found on all natural surfaces, including rocks and soil particles in and out of water. I don’t mean by scrubbing each one with a brush, but by some equally implausible process. What would be the consequences for the biogeochemical cycles of the planet? Read more →

Complex Simplicity

by Miguel Vicente  
The textbooks we used in the 20th century described bacterial division with one term, binary fission, implying a simple process. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Today we know that more than a dozen proteins are employed to make the division septum in Escherichia coli. They assemble in a complex sequence and... Read more →