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 8th ! Read more →
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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 8th ! Read more →
Posted on June 24, 2019 at 01:12 AM in Odds & Ends | Permalink | Comments (0)
Why haven’t eukaryotes developed a CRISPR system? (the immune system doesn’t count) Read more →
Posted on June 20, 2019 at 01:08 AM in Talmudic Questions | Permalink | Comments (0)
by Elio — We resume our custom to list the posts from the last half year, lightly annotated. Read more →
Posted on June 17, 2019 at 12:38 AM in Retrospectives | Permalink | Comments (0)
by Elio — Here are books that cry out to be read. I start out with a list that appeared in a website called Five Books under The best books on Microbes. Read more →
Posted on June 13, 2019 at 01:28 AM in Odds & Ends | Permalink | Comments (0)
by Jaime E. Zlamal — When there is geographical separation, we can anticipate genetic differences. That's exactly what a team led by Konstantin Severinov expected to find when they set out to study geographically distant populations of Thermus bacteria. After all, these microbes generally live in hot springs at temperatures around 160 degrees Fahrenheit (~70° C). However, despite... Read more →
Posted on June 10, 2019 at 12:59 AM in Ecology | Permalink | Comments (0)
by Roberto — This is the tale of the tail, of a phage. Years before Alexander Fleming's chance discovery of penicillin, many scientists were already interested in bacteriolytic activities. Bacteriophages played a big role in the early days of searches for bacterial killers. Read more →
Posted on June 06, 2019 at 04:00 AM in Odds & Ends | Permalink | Comments (0)
by Paul Carini — Sometimes, to move ahead, you must take a look at where you have been. Culturing microbes is a foundational underpinning of microbiology. Before genome sequencing, researchers spent countless hours tediously deducing the nutritional requirements of bacterial isolates and tinkering with medium formulations to entice new microbes into culture. This art of cultivation took a back seat to the powerful molecular tools of the last 25 years, and... Read more →
Posted on June 03, 2019 at 01:28 AM in Odds & Ends | Permalink | Comments (0)