Small Things Considered

Short Courses for Long-Term Learning

by Phoebe Lostroh | Good microbiologists question assumptions. How about the assumption that semesters are the best calendars for learning? What would happen if rather than taking four courses concurrently during a semester, students instead took those four courses successively, one at a time? This describes the Colorado College “block plan,” first implemented in… Read more →

A Day in the Life: Eavesdropping on Marine Picoplankton

by Heather Maughan |Observing microbes in nature is a challenge. Compared to what goes on in the lab, there is not much one can do with them out there. So, instead of bringing the bacteria to the lab, why not bring the lab to the bacteria? Imagine being able to capture the expression of… Read more →

Pictures Considered #2. The E. coli Chromosome Caught in the Act of Replicating

by Elio | We continue our series of images that have made a difference in microbiology. This one, published by John Cairns in 1963 has earned a most deserved place in textbooks and reviews. It shows a radioautograph of an intact E. coli chromosome in the act of replicating. From this image… Read more →

When a Good Peptide Deformylase Gets Better

by Merry Youle | When a phage invades a host’s premises, it delivers only its genome and perhaps a few specialized proteins needed immediately upon arrival. Its plan is simply to supervise production. The host is relied on to provide not only the raw materials and energy, but also the production equipment needed to… Read more →

TWiM #52: Clinical microbiology with Ellen Jo Baron

Vincent Racaniello and Michael Schmidt meet up with Ellen Jo Baron to talk about working in a clinical microbiology laboratory on the podcast This Week in Microbiology. Read more →

Who Would Have Thought? One Hundred Million Year Old Polyamines

by Elio | Paleontologists are greatly helped in their work by finding organic compounds that have been preserved in fossils through the ages. Most useful among these are the amazingly stable polycyclic terpenoid lipids, in particular the bacterial hopanoids (Click here and here), that are present in fossils about 2.4 billion years… Read more →

Feynman Said “Just Look At The Thing!”

by Jan Spitzer | On October 28, 2010, Elio posted this Talmudic Question: “Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, said: It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! To take him up on it, imagine a microscope that lets you observe single molecules in a… Read more →

Pictures Considered #1. Visualizing Coupled Transcription and Translation in E. coli

by Elio | In 1970, before this image was published, there was indirect evidence that translation in bacteria is coupled to transcription—a pronounced departure from the eukaryote way in which one process takes place in the nucleus while, the other is relegated to the cytoplasm. This classic electron micrograph by… Read more →

A PomZ Scheme For Turning One Cell Into Two

By William Margolin | The division of one cell into two daughter cells is the crux of biological reproduction. But how do cells determine where along their dimensions division will occur? For bacteria, the best-studied species for basic biology, including cytokinesis, are the old standbys Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, and Caulobacter crescentus, mainly because of their easy cultivation… Read more →