Do you think that our species is exempt from "kill-the-winner" predator-prey dynamics? (KTW is the colloquial term for the cyclical dynamic by which phages promote community evenness by reducing the numbers of the most abundant bacterial strains.) Read more →
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Some Like It Curved
by Elio — Think about it: understanding what goes on inside any cell is hard enough. Add to that the complexities of being rod-shaped, and the mind starts to boggle. People have wondered about this aplenty. For sure, many expeditions have set out to explore the poles of rod-shaped bacilli — how they are created… Read more →
Preaching to a Prokaryotic Choir
by Mark O. Martin — At my small liberal arts undergraduate institution, there is only one microbiology course, and it is generally taken by seniors. Here is an image of my Spring 2011 students, and below is the logo that the talented artist Kaitlin Reiss came up for our class T-shirts. One of my frustrations… Read more →
A Clever Bug That Is Difficile to Control
by S. Marvin Friedman — New infectious diseases emerge with worrisome frequency. Some accompany natural events such as changes in climate, while others surface with human help. Of great importance among the latter are the infections caused by Clostridium difficile (casually called C. diff). The prevalence of these infections is related to the use of certain… Read more →
Of Terms in Biology: Riboswitch
by Merry Youle — Recently we featured the term aptamer, and noted how useful these compounds are for researchers. We were talking of synthetic aptamers. But natural ones, in the form of RNA molecules, are part of an elegant mechanism that regulates gene expression in response to changing cellular levels of specific metabolites. These talented… Read more →