In their classical experiments, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty showed that streptococci in a specific growth phase take up exogenous DNA, resulting in a transformation of their phenotype... Read more →
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Happy Birthday Elio!
by Roberto and the STC team | Not long ago, Elio offered some musings "On Old Age." As is often the case when reading Elio's writings, the first couple of sentences already taught me several lessons. For one, I learned a new word, senectitude. I suspect I will be using it more and more with each passing day. But there was more, Elio revealed that his birthday... Read more →
A Losing Battle
by Elio | Relatively few people are aware the virus that causes Covid19 has its own name, to wit, SARS-CoV-2. Outside the scientific literature, this is seldom used. Yet, almost everyone is aware that the AIDS virus is called HIV. But this is exceptional. The overwhelming number of people call a virus after the disease... Read more →
TWiM 239: The Phoenix of Bacteria
The TWiM team reviews how variants of P. aeruginosa survive antimicrobial treatment, and a decrease in the antimicrobial resistance of the gut microbiome in the presence of the fungus C. albicans. Read more →
Thankfully We Aren't Facing Ebolenza
by Daniel | If you haven't had your fill of pandemic related media yet, there is one recent novel that you may want to add to the Spring/Summer reading list. Even if you're tired of hearing about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, The End of October... Read more →
We remember Tom Brock
by Elio | Tom Brock (1926 − 2021) can readily be considered the father of extremophile microbiology. He pioneered the study of high temperature-loving microbes, by investigating, in a nearly frolicsome way, the hot springs of Yellowstone Park. He carried out this work pretty much alone, with both experimental ingenuity and conceptual gusto, ... Read more →
Cyanobacteria fly kites? Come on...
by Christoph | You've probably heard of spiders that fly withtout wings. They climb onto flowers or leaves, stand on their tiptoes, and push gossamer threads of silk from their spinnerets, glands in their abdomen, and take off. They do that to reach a nearby twig when weaving their webs or to make long-distance flights, sometimes over... Read more →
Of Terms in Biology: Alpha, Beta, Gamma Diversities
by Elio
In ecology, these terms refer to various levels of species diversities...
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Fungomania III. A Yeast Messes with the Gut Microbiome
by Elio | The microbiome of the large intestine of mammals, mainly composed of bacteria, is the subject of innumerable current studies. And for good reasons. Of all the body's microbiomes, it is the largest in numbers, variety, and of likely importance in health and disease. Defying expectations, it is remarkably stable... Read more →
Fungomania II. A (not so) new face of Fusarium
by Roberto | This is a story about fusaria by an admittedly non-expert. Much of what I write in this post I just recently learned, thus revealing from the start my naïveté on the fascinating subject of fungi as high protein foods. Read more →