Small Things Considered

Talmudic Question #105

Do you know of any eukaryotic virus that has a tail, and, if not, why do you suppose there aren’t any? Read more →

Neanderthal Me

by Jamie Henzy
From the discovery of the first Neanderthal skull in a Belgian cave in 1826, a bone of contention among Homo sapiens has been the extent of our relationship to Homo neanderthalis, who disappeared from the fossil record ~30,000 years ago. Like scrappy cousins we'd rather not claim, we've attempted to distance ourselves... Read more →

TWiM #71: Colon cancer’s little shop of horrors

Vincent, Michael, and Michele explain how the gut microbiome modulates colon tumorigenesis, and regulation of intestinal macrophage function by the microbial metabolite butyrate. Read more →

Two Less

by Elio
Two people who mattered to me and to many other people have died recently. I wish to honor their memory by sharing a glimpse of them with you. Manny died on January 8, 2014, one month shy of his 96th birthday. A member of a distinguished Swiss family… Read more →

Bridges Across the Periplasmic Moat

by Merry Youle
Gram-negative bacteria pose a particular challenge to any enterprising phage. First the phage is met by the outer membrane (OM)—a barrier to surmount that also can be used as a convenient handgrip for adsorption. Next hazard is the nuclease-infested periplasm with its jungle of peptidoglycan. An infecting phage genome… Read more →

Pictures Considered #12 : How Proteomics Got Started

by Fred Neidhardt
By the mid-1970’s my mind, filled with unanswered questions about growth physiology, was searching for a new way to approach the bacterial cell. That way was revealed, not by anyone in my laboratory, but by a graduate student named Patrick O’Farrell at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A postdoctoral… Read more →

How do they make it work? Genomic Revelations on a Bacterial Consortium

by Johnna L. Roose
Do you ever look at a couple and wonder… ‘Why are they together? What does X see in Y. I just don’t get it. Is X in it only for the money’? Who doesn’t at times ponder about such matters? There’s practically an entire economy based on it. However, you… Read more →

On Teaching

by Stanley Falkow
A graduate student came to my office recently to say that she was increasingly bothered by anxiety and the ‘terror’ of having to speak at laboratory meetings. She had also learned a month ago that she was expected to lecture to a class organized by her mentor. The thought of… Read more →

How Genetic Plunder Transformed A Microbe Into A Pink, Salt-Loving Scavenger

by Lucas Brouwers
Microbiologists have long noted something odd about the Halobacteria (and not only their misleading name. They got it before the Archaea became known). In all their evolutionary analyses, they found that Halobacteria are part of a branch of archaea, the ‘methanogens’. What bothers microbiologists is that methanogens and Halobacteria couldn’t… Read more →