Small Things Considered

Of Terms in Biology: RNA Thermometer

by Christoph
Fancy calling a ther­mo­me­ter "cool"? An RNA Ther­mo­me­ter (RNAT) is, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, si­mi­lar to a Bre­guet ther­mo­me­ter − not named after the fa­mous French avia­tion pio­neer, but after his great-great-grand­father Abra­ham-Louis (1747–1823) − in that it re­acts to chang­ing tem­pe­ra­tures with ther­mal ex­pan­sion or con­tract­ion of a strip: a bi­metal­lic strip in Bre­guet's de­vice and par­tial­ly double-strand­ed RNA in an "RNA Ther­mo­meter". Read more →

Talmudic Question #180

Why didn’t mitochondria keep a DnaA-dependent origin of replication? Read more →

The Cake-Cutting Problem in the Archaeal World

by Kanika Khanna
Have you ever wondered how to slice a cake in equal pro­por­tions for a large party? Hugo Stein­haus, a fa­mous Polish ma­the­ma­ti­cian in­tro­duced a ma­the­ma­ti­cal way to deal with the fair cake-cut­ting prob­lem af­ter the se­cond world war. He pos­sib­ly used cakes as an ab­stract re­pre­sen­ta­tion of the li­mit­ed... Read more →

Erisipelothrix rhusiopathiae on TV – A Snippet

by Elio
A recent epi­sode of the Brit­ish TV series 'Doc Mar­tin' dealt with a some­what un­usu­al bac­te­ri­um. Se­ver­al child­ren in the small town in Corn­wall came down with what the good doc­tor thought was im­pe­ti­go, a high­ly con­tagi­ous skin in­fect­ion caused by staph or strep. But the lab re­port... Read more →

Getting to grips with the intangible

by Christoph
Imagine the E. coli nucleoid as a swig but of of a high­ly vis­cous tan­gle of a 2 nm thin and ~1.5 mm long DNA poly­mer, de­co­rat­ed with and high­ly com­pact­ed by a ple­tho­ra of pro­teins, and some­how sus­pend­ed in the cy­to­plasm of a cell with a vol­ume of ~1.3 µm³. It's vir­tu­al­ly im­pos­si­ble to "grip" the nu­cleoid, to mea­sure... Read more →

A Change in the Plan of Construction

by Roberto
On occasion you might come across an odd-look­ing plant where the flower or­gan has been re­placed by a leafy struc­ture. To the ama­teur gar­dener this will seem a re­mark­able cur­iosi­ty, to the pro­fes­sio­nal plant grower it will sig­ni­fy sub­stan­tial eco­no­mic los­ses. To Jo­hann Wolf­gang von Goethe such sights meant the... Read more →

TWiM 224: One hundred million year old bacteria

The genetic mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and 100 million year old living bacteria. Read more →

Sticking together «...wie Pech und Schwefel»

by Alexander Loy (@LoyTeam)
Hey geomicrobiology and microbiome tweeps! Do you know that the sul­fo­sugar #sul­fo­qui­no­vose (SQ) is a ubi­quit­ous mi­cro­bi­al nu­trient in the en­vi­ron­ment and in a ve­ge­ta­ri­an diet? No? Here comes some SQ pro­pa­gan­da…a thread Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Phylogeny, Phylogenetics, Phylogenomics

by Elio
You may remember the solemn proclamation that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," meaning that during our embryological development we (and everybody else) go through the steps in our evolution. This turns out to be quite wrong, but I bring it up because because it illustrates that phylogeny denotes the history... Read more →