Small Things Considered

A Few Thoughts About the 2012 San Francisco ASM General Meeting

by Elio
I recently returned from the ASM yearly general meeting in San Francisco. It happens to be 61 years, no less, since I attended my first such event, that one in Chicago. In those days, many members attended a giant banquet as part of the event, I well remember. As a poor graduate student… Read more →

Livestock Bacteria Are as Old as the Livestock They Kill

by Lucas Brouwers
Animals were wilder then. Horns were longer, temperaments fiercer. These wild things had forever been free when humans took control of their flocks and herds, 10.000 years ago. Through careful breeding and rearing, the first pastoralists of the Near East moulded the beasts into more docile versions of their former… Read more →

Fine Reading: Cnidarians and Dinoflagellates Together

by Merry
The very word infection brings to mind the arrival of a nasty pathogen countered by a host immune response, a battleground strewn with the carcasses of the losers. But how do you define infection? Is not the beginning of an endosymbiosis, even a mutually beneficial one, also an infection? Corals… Read more →

How an Endosymbiont Earns Tenure

by S. Marvin Friedman
Plastids and mitochondria are organelles in eukaryotic cells that originated from bacterial endosymbionts via invasion or enslavement or a synergistic amalgamation, depending on your viewpoint.Since these events occurred more than one billion years ago, it has not been possible to trace the evolutionary steps in the transition from endosymbiont to… Read more →

A Table for Two

by Elio
What fun, unless you are the one being preyed upon. Two predators, a phage and a “bacteriophagous” bacterium, simultaneously dine and reproduce in one host cell. Doesn't this open a whole lot of questions, such as: How often does co-infection take place in the wild? Do the two predators “talk”… Read more →

Oddly Microbial: Cancer Cells

by Marcia Stone
“Cancer cells are ancient alternative organisms, living protozoan-like fossils, foreign to their hosts because of deep origins elsewhere,” says oncologist Mark D. Vincent from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. They are, he asserts “In the body but no longer of the body,” and therefore deserve a radically different… Read more →

Talmudic Question #88

How come viruses have developed so many different ways to penetrate into their host cells? Read more →

Retrospective, June 2012

We continue our semi-annual ritual and post this quick tour of featured blog postings since our December, 2011, Retrospective. Read more →