by S. Marvin Friedman — Whether inhabiting soil, fresh water, or marine ecosystems, bacteria are constantly facing the threat of numerous and effective predators such as protists, nematodes, or phages. To defend against such predation, bacteria have evolved a number of strategies, including getting larger in size, moving faster, producing defensive secondary metabolites, and forming… Read more →
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Who Would Have Thought? Biggest Flower, Biggest Gene Thief
by Elio — Rafflesias in the tropical rain forests of Southeast Asia produce some of the biggest flowers in the world, up to one meter in diameter. They’re not microbes by anyone's definition of the term. Adding to their notoriety is their carrion-like smell to attract insects for pollination service. The reason they… Read more →
The Microscopic Flash Mob
by Melissa Wilks — Every day we see animals migrating through the air, across plains, and in the oceans, in beautifully coordinated patterns; starlings flock together in the thousands while sardines swim together in enormous shoals. These social behaviors are important in allowing animals to socialize, avoid predators, and find refuge and food. But what… Read more →
Talmudic Question #100
Past the origin of the first cell, what do you consider to have been the single most important event in evolution? Read more →
TWiM #64: URI and UTI at ICAAC in Denver
A recorded version of a live streaming video episode of This Week in Microbiology (TWiM), a podcast about unseen life on Earth, with Vincent Racaniello, a Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University. In Denver, Racaniello, co-host Michael Schmidt, and guests discuss E. coli, one… Read more →
It’s Time for Salmonella
by Susan Golden — If one were to ask, “What happens when Salmonella infects the gut?” it might not be obvious that you’d also need to ask, “What time is it?” But indeed you’d need to know the latter to appropriately address the former. An invading Salmonella, intent on setting up camp, is trying… Read more →
Pictures Considered #8 : A Shortened Tail
by Elio — Electron microscopy of phages came into prominence in the 1950’s and revealed many of their physical attributes such as their particulate nature, morphological complexity, “tail first” attachment to host cells, etc. Among these discoveries was that T-even coliphages contract their tail upon absorption to their E. coli hosts. A 1967 paper… Read more →
Teaching Pseudomonas to Endocytose
by Merry Youle — I offer this as an echo to Elio's post from last October, Teaching E. coli to Endocytose. There Elio reported the recent education of E. coli by the heterologous expression of a mammalian gene. I tell of a bacterium instructed by a phage… Read more →
TWiM #63: Superantigens, S. aureus, and The Armpit Microbiome
Vincent, Michael, and Michele discuss how a Staphylococcus aureus superantigen is critical for pathogenesis in a rabbit model, and the relationship of body odor to the axilla microbiome. Read more →
Gut Lecture
by Elio — Over the many years that I taught microbiology to medical students, perhaps my least favorite lecture was the one on the “normal flora,” what we now call the microbiome. What used to make me grumpy was that I could talk only in vague generalities, rambling about the intestinal flora being… Read more →