by Elio
In his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama made this pronouncement: "For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let's make America the country that cures cancer once and for all." Leaving aside its nationalistic tinge, how can one fail to applaud the intention of this proposal?
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How Can Microbes Contribute to the "War on Cancer?"
Take your kids to the bugs on a Sunday afternoon – Micropia, the world's only microbe zoo in Amsterdam
by Mathias Grote
"Nowhere in the United States can the public get a true conception of the role of microorganisms in nature and in our daily lives." These words, penned in the late 1940s by the German-American dairy microbiologist Otto Rahn in an appeal for a "museum of microbiology" should remain true for several decades to come...
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How did E. coli get named K-12 ?
by Mehmet Berkmen and Paul Riggs
We, the lovers of that sour smelling E. coli have become amazingly familiar with the name E. coli K-12. This small cell has become the powerhouse of molecular biology and has been analyzed and discussed numerous times, including in the pages of this blog. The name 'Escherichia' from Professor Theodor Escherich of Vienna is familiar...
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Gulliver and the Lilliputians, revisited
by Christoph
Now, what about small bacteria, smaller than Prochlorococcus marinus (cell volume ~0.1 µm3) or Pelagibacter ubique (cell volume ~0.1 µm3) ? I mean really small ones, small enough for a whole bunch of them to fit into, say, a cell of E. coli with its volume of 0.6 ‒ 0.7 µm3 ?
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Pictures Considered #33 : Viral Abundance and Diversity.
by Elio
This picture should hang as a poster in every microbiological lab that is concerned with viruses (and which one isn't, one way or another?). It shows how diverse the viruses that affect hosts of the three domains of life actually are, both in replication strategy and morphology. I confess,...
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Raindrops Keep Falling On Their Heads (Thanks To Mushroom Spores, That Is)
by Elio
I have two purposes in discussing a recent paper from the lab of mycologist Nik Money. One is to present a notion of the way mushroom spores may contribute significantly to rain making. The other one is introduce a noteworthy wrinkle in electron microscopy...
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Talmudic Question #129
by Barry Goldman
Can you conceive of an animal cell choosing independence and becoming protist-like? For instance, could a macrophage learn to live among the moist mosses in the woods and look perhaps like a slime mold?
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Leftover Science
by Elio
A common experience among old-time researchers is that certain results from their lab had hit a wall, there to lie dormant and forgotten. Though interesting at the time, the results were not followed up by their creators nor by friends and competitors. There are many reasons for this, perhaps the most common one being that...
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