Small Things Considered

Hedging Your Bets

by Merry Youle | Bacteria that are born genetically equal aren't necessarily the same. The same genome, residing in cells side-by-side in the same medium in the same flask, does not guarantee the same phenotype. One example that comes to mind is the persisters in E. coli populations—the small number of cells that… Read more →

My Geological Ignorance

by Elio | Some years ago, I was standing on an overlook of the badlands in the Anza-Borrego California desert, explaining to a friend that the layers of red rocks in front of us were derived from the Grand Canyon, somewhat proud that I could exercise some of my extraordinarily limited knowledge of… Read more →

Some Like it Hot

by S. Marvin Friedman | How can thermophilic bacteria not only survive, but actually proliferate, at elevated temperatures that would be lethal to all other forms of life? After extensive research during the past five decades, this question has been answered in a general way, but the molecular basis for this unusual capability has not been… Read more →

We’ve Figured It Out!

by Elio | It’s been over 50 years since I began teaching graduate students, but only in the last few do I think that we have it figured out. Here in San Diego, a consortium of research institutions has gotten together to provide a somewhat novel microbiology course for beginning graduate students. Here is what… Read more →

Energetics of the Eukaryotic Edge

by Franklin M. Harold | The most conspicuous feature in the landscape of cell evolution is the tremendous rift that separates eukaryotes from prokaryotes. This is not apparent at the level of ribosomal RNA sequences, or of molecular biology in general, but leaps to the eye of anyone intrigued by form, function and evolutionary… Read more →

Talmudic Question #70

Do you think that all bacteria are lysogens? Read more →

Endless Forms Most Viral

by Welkin E. Johnson | Perhaps more than any other biological discipline, the study of animal viruses is confined to the present. Virions are simply not the stuff of which robust fossils are made. Phylogenetic analysis can help by revealing deep relationships between extant viral lineages, yet such reconstructions lack detail (telling us nothing about… Read more →

A New Game for a New Year

by Elio | Let's come up with ways to tell definitively whether or not the nucleic acids in the Mono Lake bug GFAJ-1 have substituted a sugar-arsenate backbone for the usual sugar-phosphate one, and if so, to what extent. We suspect that everyone will have a different notion. Please share yours by posting… Read more →

Precious Metals

by Elio | Now that news of the arsenic-eating bacteria has saturated cyberspace, the airwaves, and even old-fashioned newsprint, we step back to raise a larger question: Why have so few elements from the periodic table made it into living things? You seldom hear about anything past the first few rows in the table. Read more →