Small Things Considered

TWiM #50: These things aren’t even bacteria!

Vincent, Michael, and Stanley review the scientific career of Carl Woese. Read more →

Bdellovibrio’s Appetite for Metabolites

by Henry N. Williams | Not long ago, Elio said in this blog that predation, a major force in evolution, is somewhat neglected in microbiological circles. The full implications of predation are just beginning to be uncovered as more becomes known about the ecology, physiology, and genomics of predators against microbes and their interactions… Read more →

Domestic Just for the Sake of it – The Evolution of a Fungus with Good Taste

by Daniel P. Haeusser | We know quite a bit about how the wild aurochs or their ilk evolved into tame, bossy cows and how the insignificant grass teosinte became nutritious maize, but what do we know about the evolution of microbes involved in food and drink production? For thousands of years before the… Read more →

TWiM #49: Grape-like Clusters

Vincent, Michael, and Elio discuss the HIV co-receptor CCR5 as a receptor for S. aureus leukotoxin ED, and the vineyard yeast microbiome. Read more →

Book Review: Viruses: Essential Agents of Life

by Welkin Johnson | Virology was born in 1898, and has suffered from sampling bias ever since. For decades, viruses were defined by what they were not: not as big as a bacterium, not visible with a microscope, not culturable in the absence of a host. At the dawn of the 20th century, undiscovered viruses… Read more →

Biting the Hand That Clothes You

by Merry Youle | Troublesome strains of Staphylococcus aureus are often troublesome because they carry genes for superantigens and multiple antibiotic resistance. But don’t blame the bacteria. These genes are hitchhikers that arrived by horizontal gene transfer, embedded within mobile pathogenicity islands known as SaPIs. SaPIs are common; all S. aureus strains… Read more →

Teaching Students To See Through “Microbial Eyes"

by Mark O. Martin | At my primarily undergraduate institution (3,000 students total, 12 Biology faculty, over 50 Biology majors graduated per year), there is only one microbiology course, and it is generally taught to seniors (and not all seniors at that). Considering the power and primacy of the microbial world, I have always found that… Read more →

Wolbachia Make Fruit Flies Lay More Eggs to Make More Wolbachia

by S. Marvin Friedman | If you would like to have a particularly striking organism named after you, choose your collaborator well. The Harvard rickettsiologist S. Burt Wolbach was lucky to have such a colleague—the entomologist Marshall Hertig. In 1936, Hertig gave the name Wolbachia to the endosymbionts of mosquitoes they had… Read more →

TWiM #48: It’s All About Direction

Vincent, Michael, and Jo discuss how subtle gender bias of science faculty favors male students, and the relationship of invasive infection and antibody orientation at bacterial surfaces. Read more →

Talmudic Question #94

Bacterial bioluminescence is ubiquitous in marine environments, both among free living and mutualistic microbes. Why is this phenotype comparatively rare in terrestrial and freshwater environments (the fascinating Photorhabdus being a notable exception)? Read more →