by Elio
We continue our custom of listing the posts from the last half year, lightly annotated.
Ecology
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Follow Your Nose: Towards More Ecological Antimicrobial Therapies. In his inaugural post at the helm, Roberto discusses the ecological roles of antibiotics, including those produced by microbes on the leaf cutting ants and our own nasal staphylococci.
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Hedgehogs In Your Garden. Christoph discusses the ‘micro-biogeography' of the mouth, which holds a veritable garden of bacteria. Like in all respectable gardens, there is much order in the three-dimensional array of the oral microflora. A prominent consortium, called ‘hedgehog,’ comprising 9 taxa, is found in most people’s mouths.
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Life in the Clouds. Roberto shares his rather strong impressions of life in the “paramo,” the treeless but biologically very rich high plains in the Northern Andes.
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Reach Out and Touch Some Ice. Look under the ice of the strange lakes of Antarctica, and you see bacteria clinging to undersurface by a protein rod with an adhesin at the far end. Why do they do it is for readers of Elio’s piece to find out. Maybe.
Evolution
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Picky Sticks. In Christoph’s view, vegan stick insects parasitize bacteria - they appropriate bacterial genes for pectinases, the hydrolytic enzymes needed to degrade plant polysaccharides. Fans of horizontal gene transfer, rejoice!
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A Sweater and a Shirt Came Before Just a Shirt. Did Gram negatives evolve before Gram positives? Counterintuitive thought this may sound (‘simpler’ should precede ‘complex,’ no?), there is evidence to this point.
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Where in the world is ERV-Fc? Tracing the spread of a virus over 30 million years, 28 species, and 5 continents. Zachary Williams, a Tufts graduate student traces the ancestry of Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs) and presents “tanglegrams,” matching their phylogenies with those of the hosts. He has a lot more to say about these bewildering genomic intruders.
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Standing on the Shoulders of a Tiny Giant. Graduate student Brooke Anderson discusses the domestication of the K12 strain of E. coli and its interesting consequences
- Ode to Evolution 2016 Geneticist Irwin Rubenstein celebrates evolution in all its force. The first poem on this blog
Microbes Talking
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Squids and Luminous Bacteria. A Tale of Twists and Turns. Elio tells how those most typical of bacterial components, lipopolysaccharide (in gram negatives) and murein, induce the development of the light organ of the bobtail squid that carries its bioluminescent bacteria.
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Quorum Sensing for the Mutes. Christoph discussed how, when it comes to quorum sensing, some bacteria are ‘dumb’ but not ‘deaf.’ That is, they do not make the signaling molecules but are sensitive to them. E. coli responds to these stimuli by inducing its prophages. The plot thickens, as readers of this piece will appreciate.
How Things Get Done
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Caught in the Act, Literally. To some, this may sound like voyeurism, but Christoph explains that cleverly using fluorescent proteins, bacterial mating can be directly observed under the microscope, revealing juicy details of the process.
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Cyanophages: Maximizing the Photo– and Redirecting the –Synthesis. Daniel starts the week with a pop quiz that challenges the conventional wisdom that photosynthesis genes are not likely to be found phage genomes. If you thought so, you flunked. Such genes are indeed carried by cyanobacterial phages.
- Hopanoids Again (and Again). Elio confesses to be fascinated by hopanoids, those polycyclic compounds that endure for billions of years and are among the most abundant of all organic compounds on Earth. They stiffen membranes, among other things.
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In a Hurry? Elio presents Vibrio nitriegens, a bacterium that grows 2-4 times faster than E. coli and may supplant it for work that is clock-sensitive. You might as well learn how to spell its name.
The “Bad” Guys (Depending On Where You Look From)
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The Scourge of Humans and Armadillos alike: Mycobacterium leprae. Graduate student Alison Vrbanac presents the complexities of the interactions between the leprosy bacillus and its human hoists.
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Parasites, Predators, and Piggyback Rides. Out there, are there more lytic or lysogenic ones? It depends, among other things on the density of the bacterial population. More lysogens are found at higher population levels. Alabama microbiologist Jeffrey Morris muses about phages in nature.
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Black Death for Corals: The Polymicrobial Pathogenesis of Black Band Disease. Daniel discusses how microbes cause death of corals, including the feedback loop of microbial biochemistry and its effect on the corals. Oxygen and sulfide levels altered by both bacteria and archaea matter a great deal here
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Bottoms up: Nefarious Nematodes and Red Rumps. Recent Canisius College graduate Mike Haar discusses how a nematode that infects tropical ants converts them into zombies with a red rump. A nerve in the abdomen becomes atrophied, that’s how it happens.
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Catch as Catch Can. Elio is no lover of big words, but ‘ixotrophy,’ the catching of prey by fly-paper-like stickiness, passes muster. Saprospira grandis is an expert ixotropher.
- 'Adopting' a Pathogen. Amy Vollmer asks her Swarthmore undergraduate students to pick a pathogen and to enjoy reading and writing about it.
This and That
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The Awards Two distinguished Caltech microbiologists, Dianne Newman and Victoria Orphan received this year’s MacArthur (‘genius”) awards. Nothing could be more deserved.
- Microbiopolitics. Elio mentions a couple of instances where politics and microbiology have mixed in the past.
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A Special Issue. The August 2016 issue of Nature Microbiology is full of exciting articles, Elio thinks.
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A Symbiotic Issue. The August 2016 issue of Environmental Microbiology is a treasure-trove of stories on symbioses.
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On Teaching... Why and how to present model systems in the education of microbiology graduate students. Tufts’ Michael Malamy explains his ways of doing it.
For the Literate Microbiologist
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Small Friends Books: Microbiology for All Ages. Daniel reviews five books on microbiology for the younger set.
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The Invention of Nature: Big Picture Science, with Passion. Jamie celebrates the achievements of the great 19th century biologist and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. He not only scaled the Chimborazo, but reached many other heights.
Personal Corner
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Frederick C. Neidhardt (1931 − 2016). An Obituary. We deeply lament the passing of Fred, a towering figure in our field and a good friend.
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Fred Neidhardt as a Boss. Fred’s longtime collaborator, Ruth VanBogelen, shares with us what it was like to work closely with him
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An Epistle From the Past. Elio reproduces a 1955 letter from Gunther Stent that advised him about post-doc’ ing in Europe.
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Signing Books in Boston. Elio likes to sign books. He had a chance to do it for two of them at the ASM meeting in Boston: Microbe, Second Edition, and a compilation of piece from this blog, In The Company of Microbes
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This Summer I Went A-conferencing. Elio attended the Microbial Stress Gordon Conference and had a lovely time, as per his narrative.
Games
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Decoding Microbes. Jamie encrypts the names of microbes and invites us to decipher them.
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Name-That-Bug Quiz A test of your familiarity with bacterial taxonomy. It’s fun, we hope...
Pictures Considered
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