by Elio — The 2016 MacArthur awards have just been announced. Among the handful of scientists are two microbiologists, Dianne Newman and Victoria Orphan, both at Cal Tech and both geomicrobiologists. We rejoice. Both are extraordinary scientists with an unusually broad range of interests. Read more →
« August 2016 | Main | October 2016 »
TWiM #135: Unruly individuals and their unruly friends
How critical illness alters the microbiome, and the consequences of a sewage spill into an aquatic environment, from the TWiM team. Read more →
Hopanoids Again (and Again)
by Elio — What is stranger, the fact that hopanoids are possibly the most abundant organic compounds on the planet or that, despite being of microbial origin, most microbiologists have barely heard of them? Just as inexplicable is that a PubMed search for “hopanoid” brings up a paltry total of 102 entries (“DNA” brings up 1,443,241 items!) To drive the point home, there are... Read more →
Pictures Considered #40 : The first Continuous Culture Device?
by Elio — In their paper written in 1930, two US Department of Agriculture scientists, L. A. Rogers and E. O. Whittier, probably described the first continuous culture device for bacteria. It had several of the features of what later became known as the chemostat: a growth chamber, a way to deliver fresh nutrient at a set rate, a constant level device (a side tube) to remove spent medium at the same rate as that of addition of fresh medium, and a sampling port. Read more →
A Symbiotic Issue
by Elio — The August 2016 issue of Environmental Microbiology is a treasure trove of articles on symbiotic relationships. I happen to have a soft spot for the subject (am I symbiotic with symbioses?), so this issue is a handsome gift. I will comment on just a few of the articles, chosen with some effort from all this wealth. Read more →
Talmudic Question #137
Protists are the major predators of bacteria, yet bacteria are not known (to us at least) to make many anti-protist antibiotics (violacein comes to mind). Why so few? Read more →
The Invention of Nature: Big Picture Science, with Passion
by Jamie Henzy — Scientists at one time shared the title of "natural philosophers", and largely spoke the same language. As their techniques grew in sophistication, they set as their goal nothing less than the building of a giant tower of Knowledge of all Nature. When God saw this blatant display of hubris, she struck their tongues so that their speech could no longer be understood to one another, and they scattered far and wide... Read more →
In a Hurry?
by Elio — E. coli may eventually get dethroned from its lofty position as the best studied, best known, and perhaps best exploited organism on this planet. The upstart is Vibrio natriegens, a marsh-dwelling gram-negative bacterium that grows 1.4 to 3.9 times faster than E. coli in the laboratory, depending on the medium (it also depends on which strain of the latter you're talking about). Read more →
TWiM #134: Lipids that live forever
Design of a synchronously lysing bacterium for delivery of anti-tumor molecules in mice, and hopanoids, the lipids that live forever, brought to you by the four Microbies of TWiM. Read more →
'Adopting' a Pathogen
by Amy Vollmer — Teaching microbiology is a terrific opportunity not just to introduce students to the world of microbes but also to help them to become critical thinkers and life-long learners. The challenges for us teachers are numerous: textbooks are getting thicker, yet the length of the semester is not increasing. How do we balance a sense of history with current discoveries? Read more →