Small Things Considered

The Lyme Disease Spirochete Feasts on Tick Antifreeze

by Microbe Fan
In the northeastern United States the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi spreads from one white-footed mouse to another by hitching a ride in the deer tick Ixodes scapularis. Transmission between tick and mouse occurs during the tick's rare blood meals. The larval tick acquires B. burgdorferi from an infected mouse… Read more →

The Microbial Weltanschauung*

by Elio
Had we been asked some 30 years ago how many prokaryotic cells exist on this planet, the answer would have been perhaps 10²⁰. We might have arrived at such a figure based on an estimate of the total weight of vertebrate turds produced every day and the assumption that they… Read more →

Phage Lambda’s Polar Expedition

by Merry
For a long, long time, phage lambda (λ) has known that its E. coli host was not simply ‘a well-stirred bag of enzymes’ (something we’ve come to appreciate only relatively recently). This is vital information for lambda since it needs to interact with two particular host proteins in order… Read more →

Bacteria Living Without Phages?

by Merry
Are there environments where there are abundant bacteria and no phages? Sounds like one of our Talmudic Questions, but this one has a specific answer, and that answer is Yes. That environment was found within a cystic fibrosis (CF) lung… Read more →

The Façade of E. coli K-12

by Elio
In the early days of recombinant DNA research (ca. 1973), a thunderous debate took place regarding the safety of genetic engineering. On the one side were those who proposed that messing with the genome could lead to the emergence of novel and potentially pernicious pathogens. On the other side were… Read more →

There is Hope

by Elio
Through the years, we have not had many opportunities to look forwards, to get a feeling for how science is taught in middle and high schools. But we have had a couple of wonderful encounters, one with the Jefferson Middle School and Mrs. Putnam, their sixth grade teacher in Jackson, Mississippi… Read more →

What’s Old is New: Genome Wide Manipulation of the Bacterial Chromosome in Vivo

by Michael G. Schmidt
Every now and then you come across an article that makes you sit back and hear yourself say Wow! This is what happened to me recently while preparing to discuss a paper on This Week in Microbiology (TWiM), a bi-weekly podcast produced by Vincent Racaniello and ASM, or as I… Read more →

Talmudic Question #80

Within the microbial world, is the degree of pleiotropy displayed by an organism inversely related to its genome size? Read more →

Shipwreck Microbiology

by Merry Youle
The coral reef at uninhabited Millennium Atoll (formerly Caroline Island) in the central Pacific is one of the few near-pristine reefs remaining in the world. By good fortune, Millennium has avoided most of the local devastation that has befallen other atolls in the Line Islands through colonization, extensive fishing, and… Read more →