Small Things Considered

One If by Land and Two If by Sea

by S. Marvin Friedman
Is the current preoccupation of the scientific community with sequencing every genome extant merely an exercise in providing databases for GenBank? Certainly not, for this information also reveals very important characteristics of the organism under analysis. For example, we are at the early stages of a medical revolution that will see affordable… Read more →

Lake Vostok: A New Microbial Habitat?

by Elio
You must have heard by now that Lake Vostok, a large deep lake in Antarctica, has been penetrated by a Russian drill. The scientists will have to wait until next polar summer to retrieve any material. A British and American team is trying to do the same thing on another… Read more →

Ovobacter propellens, Not Your Average Boring Bacterium

by Elio
I bet most of you have never heard of this one. And you are not alone in this. Look for it by name in PubMed and you find two entries, both from the same lab. This bug deserves better. Found by using a fairly direct enrichment technique from sediments in shallow… Read more →

Fine Reading: Houses Made by Protists

by Elio
If there is a limit to what unicellular organisms can do, you can't prove it by me. As Michael Hansell writes in an article entitled Houses Made by Protists, some single cells can make exceedingly intricate structures. Using a Q&A format, Hansell, who bears the interesting title of… Read more →

The Three Faces of Thiomargarita

by Merry Youle
Ahhh, the delicious aroma of hydrogen sulfide. When as kids we encountered it, we would hold our nose and proclaim “yuck, rotten eggs!” It is indeed produced by something ‘rotting,’ but specifically rotting under anaerobic conditions, such as in swamps and sewers. It is also abundant in coastal marine sediments, produced by the oxygen-consuming… Read more →

Talmudic Question #84

Within a group of well-studied DNA-based microbes (phages, bacteria, and eukaryotes), genome sizes are found to vary by almost four orders of magnitude. Their rates of mutation per base pair also vary... Read more →

Peer Pressure Induces Biofilm Production

by S. Marvin Friedman
Bacteria are expert census takers. Using chemical signals they can recognize when they are in a crowd, and then they respond with appropriate collective behaviors. This census taking, termed quorum sensing, activates such diverse cellular processes as bioluminescence, virulence factor production, biofilm formation, and sporulation. Pathogens often construct… Read more →

Fine Reading: Small Wonders

by Merry Youle
The bacterial endosymbionts of insects are a perpetual source of wonderment. We wonder, for example, what is driving the paring down of the genomes in the intracellular world? How far can it go? Is the pattern of gene loss similar from one endosymbiont to the next? Are they on the… Read more →