Small Things Considered

Microbe in Boston

by Elio | This year’s annual ASM meeting was different in that it combined the usual General Meeting with the antibiotic-oriented ICAAC meeting. The combined meeting was of course larger but, each of the two has always been gigantic, so bigger may not have been felt all that much. Anyhow, the cavernous spaces of the Boston Convention Center more than accommodated the hordes. Read more →

TWiM #130: Interkingdom interactions at ASM Microbe

See a special video version of This Week in Microbiology, recorded in front of a live audience at ASM Microbe 2016. The TWiMers get together at ASM Microbe 2016 in Boston to speak with David S. Schneider and Vanessa Sperandio to talk about their work on regulation of bacterial virulence in the gut by bacterial adrenergic sensors, and the physiological mechanisms that make us ill and that help us recover. Read more →

Retrospective, June 2016

by Elio | We continue our custom of listing the posts from the last half year, lightly annotated. Could retrospection lead to introspection? Read more →

Coughs, Coiled Coils, and the Classroom Cliché of Conformational Change

by Daniel P. Haeusser | So starts a verse in a modern version of the children’s folk song Pop Goes the Weasel. The 'whooping' sound generated through struggles for breath following fits of intense coughing characterizes pertussis. Caused by the beta-proteobacteria Bordetella pertussis, this highly contagious disease can seriously afflict humans of any age, particularly babies. Read more →

Summer Vacation

We are taking our customary two week vacation. Some of us will be traveling to Boston for Microbe 2016. If you'll also be there, make sure to attend the live recording of This Week in Microbiology and say hi to Elio! Read more →

TWiM #129: Dried and Wrinkled, Smooth and Mucoid.

The arrival in the U.S. of plasmid-mediated resistance to colistin antibiotics, a last line of defense against many gram-negative bacilli, and a quorum sensing system in a eukaryote are topics of this episode of This Week in Microbiology. Read more →

Seeing from the Bacterial Point of View

by Mizu Ota and Susan S. Golden | Though we live on the same planet, the world of bacteria is far removed from our own, largely because of the sheer difference in size. Life on the micrometer scale is governed by rules that do not constrain us, and vice versa: aquatic environments are dominated by viscous forces, and external stimuli such as chemical gradients occur on a scale too large to sense over the length of a single bacterial cell. And yet, some strategies used in both worlds carry at least a superficial resemblance. Surprisingly, one of these is the ability, literally, to see. Read more →

Talmudic Question #134

What effect do you think a large wind farm could have on the environmental microbiome of the area? Read more →