by Elio | Who hasn’t walked along a previously flooded area and seen flakes of dried mud cakes magically curled up in geometrical shapes? At times, the curls are so pronounced that they make complete scrolls. The area looks like a field of shards. No big deal, just dried mud you might say... Read more →
« November 2010 | Main | January 2011 »
Retrospective, December 2010
This blog is now entering its fifth calendar year, surely a respectable age for a blog, perhaps bordering on the venerable. With the passage of time, our blend of posts has included more and more contributions from guest writers, some from young students, others from experienced and distinguished microbiologists. Read more →
Talmudic Question #69
by Ramy Aziz
Is there anything microbes cannot do?
Read more →
A Role for Prions in Alzheimer’s Disease?
by S. Marvin Friedman | What if there were a connection between the diseases caused by prions and Alzheimer’s? If that were the case, we'd expect a substantial increase in our understanding of both. Indeed, as we will see below, there is now evidence that... Read more →
One in a Million
by Merry Youle | Like it or not, we can't shop around for a genetic code, nor do we have a choice of brand or model. We're pretty much stuck with the one we have at this point (although some researchers are modifying the code to synthesize proteins containing "designer amino acids"). The universal genetic code is just that, virtually universal. Read more →
Ploidy Redux
by Elio | We recently posted a short piece on the term 'ploidy' as it applies (or not) to prokaryotes. Dana Boyd pointed out that in prokaryotes the term refers to sets of identical chromosomes, unlike in eukaryotes, where each chromosome of a set is usually different. The distinction seems crucial enough to warrant further explication. Read more →