by Elio — Nature seems to be intent in fooling everyone, experienced botanists included. An example is seen in the ability of some fungi to change the terminal leaves of certain mustard plants into what look like floral petals, making them look like real flowers. Pollinating insects are attracted to them and land on these structures... Read more →
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Talmudic Question #185
Can you conceive of a virus that can divide by binary fission? Read more →
Antibiotics and the Foods We Eat
by Roberto — When it comes to the animals that humans raise to eat, a quick look at their numbers proves sobering. Worldwide, there are some 650 million pigs, 1 billion heads of cattle and 26 billion chickens. Such numbers canot be achieved by traditional animal rearing practices that use extensive surface areas. Rather, most of these animals are grown... Read more →
Towards a More Open Science
by Roberto — If there's a silver lining to these very trying pandemic time, it's a sense that the scientific community is moving more in the direction of open science. In the pre-pandemic era (which now feels eons ago) we commented on the problems with for-profit publishing and offered optimistic outlooks in terms of novel publishing strategies such as... Read more →
TWiM 237: Ten years of TWiM, a quality quorum
To celebrate ten years, TWiM asks former hosts and guests to provide their thoughts on how microbiology has contributed to our understanding of the microbial world. Read more →
100-Million-Year-Old Seafloor Sediment Bacteria Have Been Resuscitated
by guest author Jennifer Frazer — In 2010, Japanese scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Expedition 329 sailed into the South Pacific Gyre with a giant drill and a big question... Read more →
From the Kolter Lab
by Elio — Gemma Reguera at Michigan State and once a co-blogger here, will soon be the editor in chief of the ASM journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. George O'Toole at Dartmouth will become editor in chief of ASM's Journal of Bacteriology. Steven Finkel at the University of Southern California... Read more →
Bacterial Blues
by Janie — The color blue is an oddity. Of all pigments in nature – chemicals that selectively absorb and reflect certain wavelengths of visible light – blue ones are among the rarest. Producing blue dyes was once such a costly business that medieval Europeans considered it to be as precious as gold... Read more →
Of Terms in Biology: Sympatry and Allopatry
by Elio — Sympatry means that two species coexist in the same physical area, allopatry that they don't. The etymology of the suffix patris, helps. It comes from the Latin for 'fatherland,' as in 'patriot' (or, for those who remember the Marseillaise, "Alons enfants de la Patrie"). Read more →
TWiM 236: Gossamer wings and symbionts on the sea bottom
In this episode, hiring and training expectations for future biomedical life sciences faculty, and the roles of bacterial symbionts in deep-sea hydrothermal vent tubeworms. Read more →