Small Things Considered

Petri's dish vs. Winogradsky's column – shifting boundaries between purity and mixture of microbes

by Mathias Grote
There is more to say about these two articles of glassware other than the fact that every microbiologist knows that both were invented almost exactly 130 years ago by their respective epo­nyms, the German Julius Richard Petri and the Russian-French Sergei N. Wino­grad­sky. Read more →

An Exam Question

by Ramy Karam Aziz
Hi friends, every now and then I like to share one of the good stu­dent answers. In the last Micro101 final exam, I gave them this question: If you were a bacterium and you would have the choice of... Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – The Tenericutes

by Christoph
All known Tenericutes have one morpho­lo­gi­cal fea­ture in com­mon: they lack a pep­ti­do­gly­can cell wall. Their name tells the story: Te­ne­ri­cu­tes means 'soft skin­ned'. Not having this kind of 'sup­port stock­ing', many as­sume the form of blobs or drops, and, with some ex­cep­tions, do not come in fa­mi­liar shapes like rods or cocci. Think of them… Read more →

Microbial Olympians

by Jamie
With the approach of the meter-scale winter Olympic Games, we're considering likely contenders at the latest nanometer scale games, where microbes strut their stuff and awe us with their performance of amazing feats. Never heard of the Microbial Olympics? Read more →

The Nuclear Option

by Christoph
When considering "Who ate whom?", you're likely to think of the eukaryotes. They gobble up just about everything by pha­gocytosis, a common property of unicellular protists and cells of more complex multicellular eukaryotes such as us humans (macrophages, for example ). And whether it's microplastics, mineral fibers like asbes­tos, organic debris or living... Read more →

Notable Papers in 2017 – a Follow-up

by Elio
Over a week ago we posted the responses to our query about a notable paper that appeared in 2017. A number of friends and col­leagues responded with alacrity. The responses were remarkably va­ried and included research in widely disparate branches of micro­bio­lo­gy. Whereas many of the responses were from people... Read more →

Wine Archaeology

by Roberto
In his recent murder mystery post Dial "V" for Murder, Christoph stated that fewer that 30 out of STC's 1,200+ posts had dealt with the topic of horizontal gene transfer. Considering the cardinal role of that process in the evolutionary history of microbes, such a small fraction of posts – relative to the importance of the subject matter – led him to argue that one more post on the topic would not prove redundant. Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator

by Christoph
In popular terms, the marine food chain goes like this: "phytoplankton feed the zooplankton that feed the small fish (larvae) and crustaceans that feed the larger fish that feed the even bigger fish that feed us". Thus we have us, Homo sapiens, together with the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, and... Read more →