Small Things Considered

A Whiff of Taxonomy – Zymomonas

by Elio | Zymomonas is a Gram-negative alphaproteobacterial genus with a single known species, Zymomonas mobilis that promise much but do not quite deliver, at least not yet. Read more →

TWiM #207: Partnerships to Advance Public Health

From ASM Microbe 2019 in San Francisco, Vincent speaks with Victoria McGovern, Carl Nathan, and Dan Portnoy about advancing human health through innovative collaborations. Read more →

Strawberry Fields Forever

by Mechas Zambrano and Roberto | Close your eyes for a mo­ment and ima­gine your­self in front of a plate full of fresh­ly picked, bright red, fra­grant, ripe, and sweet straw­ber­ries. For most of you, that should be a tru­ly "mouth water­ing" ex­per­i­ence. If you do en­joy straw­ber­ries, you are part of a long and wide­spread plea­sure that goes back mil­len­nia through the eat­ing of wild straw­berry spe­cies... Read more →

Talmudic Question #170

Why is RNA replication limited to the viruses and viroids? Read more →

Will the real phage lambda please stand up?

by Nicholas Redmond | Phage infection of a bacterial cell typically begins when the phage’s tail fibers bind a receptor on the host cell, allowing for the ejection of genetic material. At this point, either the lytic or lysogenic cycle begins. Read more →

Bullseye! Promising Research on a Vaccine for Lyme Disease

by Samantha Rocha | Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease in the United States, with most cases occurring in the Northeastern states. Western blacklegged ticks commonly reside on deer, where they become infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the agent of Lyme disease. Read more →

Limiting Manganese to Reduce Enterococcus faecalis Virulence

by Madeline Beaulieu | With the reported rise in antibiotic-resistant pathogens, it remains important to study the basic biology of these organisms to uncover what makes them so durable. Why do they survive so well in certain environments, and how might we effectively interfere with that? Read more →

Outer Membrane Vesicles and Biopearling – A Snippet

by Elio | When I started out in microbiology some 70 years ago, bacte­ria were just little balls or sausage-shaped rods, and, if you were of a fancy mindset, corkscrew-like structures. Some were endowed with flagella or capsules, but not much else. Their surface area was limited to what you could see under an optical microscope. Read more →

TWiM #206: Bacteria send nucleotide signals

The TWiM holobionts pay tribute to Stuart Levy, and reveal the remarkably diverse array of cyclic nucleotides synthesized by bacteria that likely mediate interactions with animal and plant hosts. Read more →

Membranes to Molecular Machines: A Mechanical Vision of Life

by Janie | In his new book, Mathias Gro­te delves into our mo­le­cu­lar ma­chines with a fo­cus on mem­branes and their com­po­nents, es­pe­cial­ly pumps. He gives struc­tu­ral bio­lo­gy time in the lime­light – a break from the genetics and ge­no­mics frenzy of the modern era. Read more →