Small Things Considered

The Magasanik Paradox

by Elio | The journal Nature published a study of the most 100 most cited scientific papers that provides food for thought to the working stiffs (I used to be one). First of all, I find it quite natural for any researcher to keep an eye on how often his or her work is cited. Read more →

Making Mutants – And Watching Them "In the Making"

by Christoph Weigel | Having studied the famous Luria-Delbrück experiment from 1943, you know, as a geneticist, how to "make" an E. coli strain resistant to the streptomycin: grow cells to late-log phase in a flask, withdraw 1 ml of the culture, spread 0.1 ml aliquots on several agar plates containing 20 µg/ml of the antibiotic, and incubate the plates overnight... Read more →

Pictures Considered #23. What Grains Tell...

by Christoph Weigel | In #2 of our 'Pictures Considered' series Elio had considered the iconic autoradiograph by John Cairns showing an intact circular Escherichia coli chromosome. We had a brief discussion in the comments to that post whether Cairns' autoradiograph proves... Read more →

Hydrophobic Sequestration

by Kalia Bistolas | What do your laundry detergent and hydrocarbon-degrading marine bacteria have in common? Not much, besides surfactants. These substances lower the surface tension between substrates, targeting hydrophobic molecules like the stain on your favorite shirt or crude petroleum slicks in the Gulf of Mexico. In doing so, they serve as detergents, emulsifiers, and dispersants. Hydrocarbon-Degrading Marine Bacteria (HDMB) synthesize biosurfactants that... Read more →

STC Poll #2 - Vote for the technique that you think has most influenced your field

Vote for the technique that you think has most influenced your field recently! Note that all terms have already found their way into Wikipedia.. Read more →

Let's Not Forget Acetabularia

by Elio | If I asked you what was the experimental basis for the central dogma of biology (DNA makes RNA makes Protein), you would be likely to mention the classical findings that the transforming principle was DNA (Avery et al.) or that phages transfer DNA to the host (Hershey & Chase). However, it is unlikely that... Read more →

Talmudic Question #116

 
Can anyone tell this thin section is of a bacterium or an archaeon? (And what's the point of our asking this question?) Read more →

Microbiology’s Crucial Role in First Response Humanitarian Aid

by Noor Shakfeh | To many, microbiology is largely perceived as a profession predominantly practiced in the lab. However, during a trip to deliver humanitarian aid in Syria, I saw firsthand the crucial role microbiology can play in first response humanitarian aid, and why it should be a factor considered... Read more →