Small Things Considered

Kryptonian Vision

by Jennifer Gutierrez
X-ray vision, once the exclusive domain of Superman and his super hero kin, is now a tool in the biological researchers kit. Granted, not every researcher has access to this superpower; the required synchrotron light sources are found only at large research facilities that happen... Read more →

A Holin One

by Merry Youle
When time's up, an infecting phage lyses its host cell, thus releasing the assembled virions. This process has been intensively studied in the coliphage λ. Here the phage-encoded holin proteins are said to "permeabilize" the E. coli membrane, thus allowing... Read more →

Time's Up

by Merry Youle
Holins are the smallest known biological timers. Timers, not clocks. Timers tick along, then go off after the specified interval. These small, phage-encoded proteins time the length of lytic infections of some phages. When they go off, the game is over and... Read more →

And The Winner Is…

by Elio
...The transposases! The contest, in case you wonder, was for the most abundant set of genes in the known universe, or at least in the genomic data banks available on Earth. Aziz, Breitbart, and Edwards examined some 10 million genes from 2137 sequenced genomes (47 archaeal, 725 bacterial, 29 eukaryotic and 1336 viral) plus 187 metagenomes, in search of... Read more →

When Crenarchaeota Divide, They Multiply

by Jenn Tsau and Suzy Szumowski
When cells divide, it’s really important that they do so equitably so you don’t end up with some having too much and some too little cell material; the results of either could be deleterious. Therefore, over the billennia that life has been around, mechanisms to carefully divvy up... Read more →

Fine Reading: March of the Microbes by John Ingraham

by Elio
A good friend has written a good book. March of the Microbes, just published by Harvard Univ. Press, presents tales from the microbial world, wide and deep. It emphasizes microbial activities that you can see, smell, touch, taste, and, if you include cows belching, hear. Read more →

All Is Fair in Love and Warfarin

by Shigeki Miyake-Stoner and Spencer Diamond
It turns out the drug warfarin has nothing to do with war, but it does involve a recently discovered link between bacteria and humans. Warfarin derives its name from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation where it was first developed, and... Read more →

Talmudic Question #59

Which prokaryotic cells are more abundant on Earth: planktonic (free living) or sessile (adhering to surfaces)? Keep in mind that the ocean waters contain abundant floating surfaces, e.g., marine snow. Read more →

On the Continuity of Biological Membranes

by Franklin M. Harold
Thirty years ago, Günter Blobel of the Rockefeller University published a short paper entitled Intracellular Protein Topogenesis, which laid the conceptual foundations for our understanding of how cells build membranes. To serve their functions, peripheral and integral proteins must... Read more →