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