Small Things Considered

Summer Vacation

by the STC team
We are taking our customary two week vacation. Do you think we deserve it ? Looking forward to seeing you again on July 2nd ! Read more →

The Microbial Ecology of Chocolate

by Roberto | Being retired, I no longer get the opportunity to brainstorm with post-doctoral candidates hoping to join the lab about possible projects to pursue (an activity that I greatly enjoyed for many years). But ideas of interesting research areas in the microbial sciences still arise often in my mind. So I will, on occasion, use... Read more →

Retrospective, June 2018

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

On Bacteria Getting Fat

by Roberto | In bacteria and archaea, lipids seem to be found mainly in the cell membrane. Can you think of possible functions for lipids elsewhere in bacterial and/or archaeal cells? On first inspection, these two opening sentences have the makings of an STC Talmudic Question. Except for the fact that intracellular fat accumulation or, more precisely, cytoplasmic lipidic inclusions... Read more →

No hiding among the trees: forensic phylogenetics

by Jamie Henzy | Some 50 years ago, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling proposed that molecules could be read as "documents of evolutionary history". The molecules to which they referred were proteins, and the sequence of the amino acids that specified each. Read more →