Small Things Considered

Making Waves at Asilomar

by Elio | It’s seldom that a bug has a negative effect on me. It's usually just the opposite: bugs make my day. But this time, some kind of bronchitis virus prevented me from going to a meeting that I would have truly loved to attend. Read more →

About Our Talmudic Questions

by Elio | We have now posted Talmudic Question #50, so this may be a time to reflect on this endeavor. True to our intent, these have been questions that have no definitive answers but most of the responses offered thoughtful conjectures. Read more →

Talmudic Question #50

What do you think are the most interesting questions in present day microbiology? Read more →

Retrospective, June 2009

by Elio

We present here a lightly annotated list that includes most of our posts from the past half year. Read more →

Fine Reading: Emma Darwin

by Elio | Just when you thought that everything conceivable has been written about Charles Darwin on his bicentennial, a revealing perspective on his wife, Emma, appeared in the journal International Microbiology. Written by the distinguished science writer Mercé Piqueras, the article... Read more →

The World Is Pleiotropic

by Elio | So there! By this rash assertion I mean that in the biological world almost every macromolecular constituent is likely to function in more than just one way, i.e., is pleiotropic. One and the same protein may be enzymatic, regulatory, and structural... Read more →

A Nuclear Family

by Merry Youle | Certain mussels called “bathymodiolins” are part of the spellbinding fauna of the dark world of oceanic hydrothermal vents and cold seeps. Similar to other metazoans in that realm, they rely on chemosynthetic bacteria... Read more →

Say, Brother, Can You Spare a DNA?

by Merry Youle | Mention horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in bacteria, and what comes to mind is the acquisition of new traits and capabilities across large evolutionary distances. Not so for the neisseriae. For them, HGT is a means to swap genes with other members of the species and to maintain... Read more →