by Elio
Student blogs there are that gladden an old man’s heart. Here’s a sampling.
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The Next Generation (Or Two)
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Talmudic Question #58
What if all phages on this planet went on strike and refused to have their genes expressed?
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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...
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