Small Things Considered

The Art of Microbial Alchemy

by Gemma Reguera | In 2001, Kashefi and collaborators published an article inApplied and Environmental Microbiology reporting the surprising finding that several iron-reducing microbes can use gold as an electron acceptor for their respiration. These microbial alchemists included both mesophilic and thermophilic bacteria as well as hyperthermophilic archaea. The beauty of this process is… Read more →

TWiM #55: In the Copper Room

Vincent, Elio and Michael discuss the finding that copper surfaces reduce microbial burden and hospital-acquired infections in the intensive care unit. Read more →

A Good Defense Is Worth Stealing

by Merry Youle | One widely-used tactic for defense against phage and other mobile genetic elements is to deploy a CRISPR-Cas system (click here and here) to recognize and chop them into pieces. Based on sequenced genomes, 60% of Bacteria and 90% of Archaea have the wherewithal to dispatch invaders this way. But phages… Read more →

E. coli Cells Face FACS and Get Back into Shape

by Kimberly K. Busiek | There’s no question that variation in size and shape has conferred selective advantages over the course of evolutionary time. One of the most obvious examples are the long neck and legs of the giraffe, which allow it to snatch foliage that is unreachable by vertically challenged competitors. The variable beak… Read more →

Pictures Considered #3. How Do You Know There Is a Nucleoid?

by Elio | What is more commonplace than saying that prokaryotic cells possess a nucleoid? It is implicit in the term prokaryote itself. Still, it was not shown definitively until the 1940s that bacteria and archaea have such differentiated structures made up of condensed DNA. It was the careful work of “bacterial… Read more →

Whose Planet Is It Anyway?

by Elio | This is the title my friend Fred Neidhardt recently used for a talk, and a good question it is. I suppose that most microbiologists and the readers of this blog would split the answer down the middle, the biomass of this planet and the chemical transactions therein being about half… Read more →

TWiM #54: Dueling Injectors and the Microgenderome

Vincent, Elio, and Michael review how sex-dependent differences in the mouse microbiome regulate type I diabetes, and counterattack among bacteria. Read more →

Talmudic Question #97

What is the minimum set of adaptations that HIV would have to acquire in order to become a successful airborne pathogen like influenza? Read more →

Holey Biofilm!

by Gemma Reguera | As a child, I was always fascinated by the holes (or eyes) in Swiss cheese, always inspecting the tunneling system before getting a good bite. Although the holes are the result of microbial activity (the accumulation of CO2 released by fermentative bacteria), I bring up the Swiss cheese analogy… Read more →

Microbes or Not, Parasites All

by Elio | Parasites pose a problem for the semantically-oriented microbiologist. There is no question that unicellular parasites such as Giardia, Plasmodium, or Toxoplasma are microbes, thus we can appropriate them with impunity. But what about parasitic worms? They are clearly not microscopic* and are taxonomically apart from parasitic protist. Yet parasitic protists… Read more →