Small Things Considered

Fine Reading: A Collection of Notable Publications from 2017

by Roberto and Elio
As this past year came to a close we wanted to get a collection of salient publications to share with our STC audience. To assemble this collection, we asked a number of our friends and colleagues from many locations across the globe to select a publication from 2017 that they found particularly fascinating. Along with... Read more →

Talmudic Question #151

Should a cellular life form be found outside our planet, would you guess it would look more like a coccus or a rod? Read more →

Dial "V" for Murder

by Christoph
If you read this blog fre­quent­ly and, per­haps, be­cause we "em­pha­si­ze the un­usu­al and the un­ex­pect­ed phe­no­me­na", you may feel a little, Um.., bor­ed to see yet ano­ther post on ho­ri­zon­tal gene trans­fer (HGT). But wait, we've ac­tu­al­ly touch­ed this to­pic in few­er than 30 of our 1,200+ posts. That's less than the... Read more →

More Sand Grains

by Christoph
What you see here in Figure 1d competes with a NASA photo from 2012 for the best shot of the Milky Way but – spoiler alert! – it's actually a close-up of some humble microbes gathered on a grain of sand. I concluded the previous post about bacteria on sand grains with the question: and where are the archea ? The reason for... Read more →

One Grain of Sand

by Christoph
Microbiologists face three problems today when talking to fellow biologists or any curious audience: the numbers of pro­kar­yo­tes and unicellular eukaryotes, their diversity, and their tininess. Sure, one can do the maths and juggle with numbers. That's entertaining, and everybody is amazed when they learn that microbiologists easily count up to 10⁸ individual cells in an E. coli  colony... Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – Granulicatella and Abiotrophia

by Christoph
Streptococcus pneumoniae and its ilk are among the first human pathogens discovered. Streptococci were first described by the Austrian surgeon Theodor Billroth in 1874, and Louis Pasteur showed in 1879 that they were the etiological agent (=microorganisms and microbial toxins that cause disease in humans) responsible for puerperal fever in women. Streptococcal infections vary in severity from... Read more →

Retrospective, December 2017

by Elio
As is our custom, we provide a lightly annotated list of most of our posts (with links) from the past half year... Read more →