Small Things Considered

TWiM #40: A Mecca for Microbiology

Vincent and Stanley meet with Waclaw Szybalski and John Kirby at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the occasion of its designation as a Milestones in Microbiology site. They reminisce about how the well known laboratory has advanced the science and teaching of microbiology, and discuss John’s work on the soil dwelling, predatory myxobacteria. Read more →

Revisiting BYOG: Bring Your Own Gene

by Merry Youle
For this, my last post as co-blogger, I chose to loop back to my very first post about my favorites among the many Small Things, the phages. That was BYOG: Bring Your Own Gene, published in March of 2008, recounting what was at the time a totally new story for… Read more →

The Road to Microbial Endocrinology

by Mark Lyte
The emergence of the field of microbial endocrinology did not follow a straight course, nor was the destination intuitively obvious at the start. Like many research paths before it, the theoretical underpinnings of the field only emerged when it became obvious that the only explanation for the facts was a… Read more →

Requiem for a Machine

by Elio
Here’s a challenge for present-day systems biologists. Say you wanted to find out how many ribosomes are present in cells growing under different conditions. How would you do it? You might think of using quantitative PCR to measure the amount of rRNA inside the cell. However, you could end up… Read more →

Life On the Edge: What Happens When Phosphorus Is Limiting?

by Howard Goldfine
For many bacteria, scarcity of phosphorus—serious though it may sound—is not insurmountable. True, phosphorus is needed for nucleic acids and phospholipids, but many prokaryotes have found a way to reduce their need of this element for phospholipid synthesis. But first, why are there phospholipids in the first… Read more →

TWiM #39: What Darwin Never Knew

Vincent, Michael, and Elio review chapters from Microbes and Evolution, a collection of short, personal essays by microbiologists. Read more →

Fine Reading: Speciation by Symbiosis

by Elio
No doubt, one of the defining events in evolution was the acquisition by some primitive cell of bacterial symbionts that became mitochondria and chloroplasts. Symbiosis has, in fact, driven evolution in many other ways and has had a profound effect in the origin of species. For a deeper understanding of… Read more →

MicroRNAs and Retroviral Integrity

by Jamie Henzy
Among retroviruses, the deltaretrovirus genus is something of a shady bunch, its members lurking in the shadows, causing trouble in the form of persistent infections that result in lymphomas and leukemias. At this time, we know of no endogenous sequences that might be their ancestors—the lone retroviral genus… Read more →

Ehux: The Little Eukaryote with a Big History

by Jaime E. Zlamal
There is an organism out there that is smaller than you, older than you, and that has a house that’s probably fancier than yours. Meet Emiliania huxleyi, or Ehux. Ehux is a miniscule coccolithophore, a beautiful single-celled alga that doesn’t get enough attention in the world of microbiology. The tendency… Read more →

Two Tales of Symbiosis

by Elio
I don't get tired of symbioses, something I attribute to the Power Law of Symbiosis I just made up: Interacting genomes are more interesting than single ones by the nth power of their numbers, where n is a matter of personal preference. Here I relate two examples that should make… Read more →