by Zachary Williams — When doctors in the 1980s noticed that people were dying from severe immune deficiency, nobody had ever seen anything like it before; it was a completely novel and terrifying disease. Once we figured out it was caused by a virus, the natural question was, where did it come from? It turns out that HIV was the result of zoonosis: the transmission of a pathogen to humans from other animals... Read more →
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Pictures Considered #39
by Elio — When was green florescent protein (GFP) first used with a prokaryote? Or with a eukaryote for that matter? It seems that the first paper on the subject was by Chalfie, Tu, Euskirchen, Ward, and Prasher, published in Science in 1994. For this work, Chalfie received... Read more →
Standing on the Shoulders of a Tiny Giant
by Brooke Anderson — Don't you wonder how a single species can range from protective gut commensal to lethal pathogen to laboratory best-friend, and yet still be Escherichia coli? With such broad variety, how similar can all these strains be? True, their conserved genes have a 98% sequence similarity, but other genes vary by up to 40% between the lab strain and... Read more →
Talmudic Question #136
Virus types are highly unevenly distributed among their hosts. E.g., Bacteria harbor relatively few RNA viruses, Archaea none to our knowledge. Any idea why? Read more →
The Scourge of Humans and Armadillos alike: Mycobacterium leprae
by Alison Vrbanac — Leprosy, an ancient disease, is interwoven with human history. The earliest written recordings date back to the Egyptian Ebers papyrus from 1550 BC, though the causative agent of the disease, Mycobacterium leprae, had to wait for 1873 to be identified by Gerhardt Hansen. Historically, leprosy presented as a chronic and incurable disease, often leading to severe... Read more →
Small Friends Books: Microbiology for All Ages
by Daniel P. Haeusser — We recently featured research on black band disease in corals. Today, I highlight illustrated children’s books of microbiology. One, titled Zobi and the Zoox turns to the beneficial, symbiotic role that microbes play in corals. This lovely award-winning book is part of a series from Small Friends Books, which to date includes another picture book... Read more →
TWiM #132: Bacteria learn long division
Vincent, Elio, and Michele present cell division by longitudinal scission in an insect symbiont, and thermally activated charge transport in microbial nanowires. Read more →
Picky Sticks
by Christoph— As we know from our herbivorous mammalian relatives, the ruminants, you need to host certain microbes in your guts to subsist on plant polysaccharides other than starch – think salad or grass. Such 'non-starch' polysaccharides include cellulose, pectin, and a few others – together, they are commonly known as 'fibers'. Fibers are, for the most part, indigestible... Read more →
This Summer I Went A-conferencing
by Elio — In July, I attended the 2016 Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Stress. This is an august meeting with 2 decades to its name. The subjects presented were broader than the name of the meeting suggests and included many aspects of microbial physiology and genetics, touching even on ecology and evolution. "Stress," especially in the world of... Read more →
Parasites, Predators, and Piggyback Rides
by J. Jeffrey Morris — In the adorable kid's book 'My Lucky Day', a wily and disarmingly cute piglet tricks a fearsome fox into giving him a spaghetti dinner, a bath, and a massage. In the end, Mr. Pig slips away after Mr. Fox passes out from exhaustion. We later learn that, far from being an innocent... Read more →