by Janie | Almost a century ago, Walther Goebl and Oswald Avery observed that Streptococcus pneumoniae cells lysed upon entering stationary phase, but the mechanism behind this autolysis remained elusive.
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by Christoph | Worry not, this is no lengthy contemplation on the use of classical Latin in scientific language. It's a not-so-short piece to emphasize that it makes sense to mark the ends of non-branched polymers like DNA and RNA, and thereby define their chemical directionality. Bioinformaticians who routinely work with DNA and RNA in fasta...
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by Christoph | «let not Vanity ſeduce you to perſiſt in your Miſtake». No, it's not a spelling mistake that you see here. It's the 'long ſ', which was used in print well into the 18th century. And also the capitalization of nouns, unusual today, was common in 1743 when Henry Baker's treatise The Microscope Made Easy was published...
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by J. Jeffrey Morris | I have a confession to make. I get stressed. A lot. I think I've spent the better part of the last three years with the vague feeling I'm forgetting something really important. I bet there are a few people in the reading audience that can sympathize – it seems to be a pretty common experience for assistant professors. The stressors come...
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Vincent, Michele, and Michael travel to San Diego to reminisce with Elio about his career, his work in microbiology, and his love for microbes and mushrooms.
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by Elio | A rather specific term, trophosome refers – as per the Wikipedia – to 'an organ found in some animals that houses symbiotic bacteria that provide food for their host.' Trophé (τροφή) denotes nourishment, soma (σῶμα), body, denoting that trophosomes are intimately involved in their host's nutrition.
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by Elio | Tampering with the chemistry of our holiest of molecules may seem sacrilegious, but it is widespread and conspicuous. In fact, DNA modifications abound. Think, for starters of DNA methylation, which is the main tool of epigenetics, or an even longer known modification, the DNA glycosylation that in some phages protects their DNA from...
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Moselio (Elio) Schaechter & Roberto Kolter
The purpose of this blog is to share our appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet. We will emphasize the unusual and the unexpected phenomena for which we have a special fascination... (more)