Small Things Considered

Talmudic Question #162

Can you imagine a eukaryotic virus that can infect a bacterium or an archaeon? Read more →

Book Review: The Power of Plagues

by Daniel | Microbiology nonfiction books tend to fall into the acade­mic category, basically as curated collections of review articles that detail a relatively specialized niche of the field. At the other end of the spectrum lie those books written purely for a general audience that might bring in microbiological themes within a larger scope, usually human health. Read more →

Happy Birthday LTEE!

by Roberto | Come this Sunday, February 24, 2019, all of us at STC will be raising a celebratory glass in honor of the remarkable LTEE, the E. coli long-term evolution experiment, which will be reveling in its 31st birthday. Read more →

Escape From the Wall

by Roberto | Who would have thought it? That the bac­terial cell wall would turn out to be so rea­di­ly dis­pen­sa­ble. Among the first les­sons I taught on bac­te­ri­al cell struc­ture was the fact that the ever pre­sent cell wall, com­posed pre­do­mi­nant­ly of pep­ti­do­gly­can, forms a pro­tec­tive shield around the cyto­plas­mic mem­brane. A shield that pre­vents the bac­te­ri­al cell... Read more →

Nano Pétanques – A Snippet

by Christoph | "The power of evolution is revealed through the di­ver­si­ty of life." Aha! It was so­lemn­ly de­clar­ed by the No­bel Prize com­mit­tee in their sta­te­ment an­nounc­ing last year's che­mis­try priz­es for "the di­rect­ed evo­lu­tion of en­zymes [and] phage dis­play of pep­tides and anti­bodies". Roy­al aca­de­mies – na­tio­nal or other aca­de­mies like­wise – tend to add luster... Read more →

Inside Earth, Microbes Approach Immortality

by Jennifer Frazer | Last December, the Deep Carbon Observatory an­nounced an astounding fact: the mass of the mi­crobes living beneath Earth's surface amounts to 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon, a sum some 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans. That's amazing. It wasn't so long ago we weren't even sure life at depth was possible. Read more →

The Fires of Saint Anthony – A Snippet

by Roberto
Just recently, after giving a very general public lecture on microbes, the discussion went – not surprisingly – in the direction of humans and our relationships to our microbiota. Read more →

Salamalga

by Jamie | Long, long ago, some two billion years, when earthlings were represented solely by prokaryotes, there existed dense microbial mats, bustling with activity and with metabolic sophistication to match the most advanced engineering of eukaryotic metropolises of today. In­cluded in the mats were many types of bacteria alongside their "odd­ball" brethren, members of the Archaea family. Like any complex com­munity of entities with varied interests, there was friction, there was war, there were truces, there was stealing, and sometimes there was cooperation.  Read more →