by Elio
The Fungi have an intense obsession with spreading their spores far and wide. Accordingly, many mushrooms make spores by the millions, giant puffballs by the billions. Most of the spores have little chance to succeed, but there is safety in numbers (a strategy not unlike that of the vertebrate males seeking reproduction).
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Making Like a Flower
TWiM #148: Neanderthal Dentistry
Vincent, Elio, and Michael reveal what Neanderthals ate from analysis of DNA in their teeth, and new CRISPR-Cas systems found in the genomes of uncultured microbes.
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Fungi, The Tillers
by Elio
"The fossil record of life's earliest steps onto land is profoundly incomplete." So starts a paper by Cambridge University's Martin Smith that helps shed light on this momentous happening. The climb ashore took place about 500 million years ago, give or take (no one seems to be quite sure of the date). These successful adventurers were plants, but still far from the highly-evolved plants...
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Talmudic Question #143
On the planet Trafalmadore there are no lytic phages, only lysogenic ones that are only rarely induced to produce progeny virions. How does their planetary microbiome differ from ours?
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On the Discovery of CRISPR – An Interview
by Roberto
It was August 21, 1992 when a graduate student at the University of Alicante, Spain studying the transcriptional responses of the archaeon Haloferax mediterranei to high salinity noticed an unusual pattern of repeated sequences in a gel. Soon thereafter he noticed that a similar pattern of repeats had been reported in Escherichia coli in 1987 and in Mycobacterium bovis in 1991...
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Did the Neanderthals Eat Mushrooms?
by Elio
A recent report in Nature carries the tantalizing title “Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus.” A consortium of some 30 authors from about a dozen countries studied the dental plaque of five Neanderthals, two found in caves in Belgium, two in Spain, and one in Italy.
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Why Did Jacques Monod Not Become Ole Maaløe
by Elio
I was asked recently why Jacques Monod did not followup on his early work on bacterial growth. Instead, he happily veered in a different direction and went on to become one of the fathers of Molecular Biology. Together with François Jacob, he proposed the operon model and other key breakthroughs on the regulation of gene expression...
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Fine Reading: Killing by Type VI Secretion...
by Elio
A recent paper by McNally et al. entitled: 'Killing by Type VI secretion drives genetic phase separation and correlates with increased cooperation' begins with the felicitous paragraph below. I think that it encapsulates the main features of the paradigm shift that has occurred recently, from bacteria as lone...
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On Shape
by Manuel Sánchez
If there is something that draws attention to the study of eukaryotes it is the enormous diversity of their morphology, from the largest sequoias to the smallest radiolaria. Prokaryotes, on the other hand, seem rather simple and boring. If you open page 109 of the 7th edition of Murray, Rosenthal, and Phaller's "Medical Microbiology" you will find...
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ID the Microbe...
by Elio, Daniel, Roberto & Christoph
A bacterium, an archaeon, and a protist walk into a bar... No, not this one again! To be honest, it was actually just Elio who walked into the bar, waving a transmission electron micrograph (TEM). "I spent hours with the electron microscopist but could not come up with...
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