Small Things Considered

The Next Generation (Or Two)

by Elio

Student blogs there are that gladden an old man’s heart. Here’s a sampling. Read more →

Mother’s Love

by Elio | Binary fission is a most impressive invention. In one fell swoop, it ensures that progeny cells are born alike and endowed with the same potential for growth and survival. Simple as it sounds, it must have taken considerable evolutionary contortions to make it function so well... Read more →

Prophage Masquerade

by Merry Youle | Roseovarius nubinhibens recently joined the exclusive club of about a thousand bacteria whose genomes have been sequenced. Why this honor? It’s a member of one of the most ubiquitous and most intensely studied clades of α-Proteobacteria, the marine roseobacters. This populous group... Read more →

Five Questions About Lysogeny

by Merry Youle | Lysogeny – a nasty time bomb or a mutually beneficial symbiosis? A prophage gone lytic will murder its host, but a symbiotic picture can well be argued. Here are some thoughts about the ongoing give-and-take. More details are... Read more →

Of Archaeal Periplasm & Iconoclasm

by Elio | Biology is the iconoclast’s paradise. Over and over, cherished beliefs, some dating back for centuries, fall to the ground as exceptions to the rule are discovered. To the long list of such exceptions, we now add the finding by groups in... Read more →

Naegleria ’s Split Morphology Disorder

by Psi Wavefunction | By default, a membrane-bound entity like a cell should be a spherical, formless blob. However, most cells are not such formless blobs, but rather have adopted one or more forms from a vast repertory of stunningly complex morphologies. To wit, see (and admire) the radiolarians... Read more →

Talmudic Question #58

What if all phages on this planet went on strike and refused to have their genes expressed? Read more →

A Close Encounter of the Enological Kind

by John Ingraham | Early in my career, by good fortune, I encountered the malolactic fermentation. Investigating it by standard microbiological methods led to results that changed the way California red wines are made, for the better most agree. How satisfying it is to think that I was following in the footsteps of Pasteur, no less, and his early career... Read more →