Small Things Considered

Michael Goldberg, Thirty Years The ASM's Executive Director

by Elio
You must have heard it said that no one is indispensable to an institution. Maybe so, but such truths come in degrees. Every so often someone comes along who makes a genuine difference in how an organization functions. I turn here to Michael Goldberg, who thirty years ago began... Read more →

The Most Abundant Small Things Considered

by Merry Youle & Gemma Reguera
The pioneering sequencing of environmental 16S rRNA bacterial genes from Sargasso Sea samples, reported by Giovannoni and colleagues in a 1990 Nature  paper, revealed a great genetic diversity of marine bacteria. It also identified the most abundant rRNA sequences as belonging to a group of bacteria with no cultivated representatives... Read more →

Pictures Considered #24 : Ostreococcus tauri, the Smallest Known Eukaryote

by Elio
Ostreococcus tauri is about as small as a free-living eukaryote can get. Its disk-shaped cells are as small as 0.8 µm, which makes it possible to examine them by electron cryotomography. As reported in a paper from the Jensen lab, there is barely enough room in these cells... Read more →

Noncoding DNA and Bacterial Evolution

by S. Marvin Friedman
The rapid pace of bacterial evolution is thought to result from the ease with which these organisms acquire new genetic information. What is the source of the genetic variation behind these bits of razzle-dazzle? The primary basis of bacterial phenotypic plasticity has long been considered to be changes in gene content resulting from horizontal gene transfer (HGT) as well as... Read more →

Lively Reading for Our Phage World

by Elio
How often do you come across a book that sets the stage for a new genre, one that embodies a novel concept of how scientific books could be written? That is rare, indeed, but here is one fashioned by an original notion of how to present science to scientists. Between its covers, stiff presentations of cold facts and formally... Read more →

Wood Digestion with Nary a Microbe in View

by Elio
Eating wood is a way of life for creatures such as termites, bark beetles, and certain mollusks including the infamous shipworms. A few invertebrates make at least some of the enzymes needed digest cellulose... Read more →

Talmudic Question #117

by Daniel Haeusser
Why do you suppose the lipopolysaccharide of gram-negative bacteria (LPS or endotoxin) has been singled out to be so toxic? Why do harmless commensals keep carrying LPS? Read more →

The Archaellum — The Motility Structure of Archaea

by Sonja-Verena Albers and Ken Jarrell
The two prokaryotic domains, Archaea and Bacteria may share the same general body plan and be hard to tell apart at a glance, but they differ in many of their constituent parts. The list of differences is quite long and includes strategies for synthesizing macromolecules, making protective cell envelopes, and, perhaps surprisingly, their organs of locomotion. We say this because... Read more →