by Elio — In the beginning of this gorgeous and intellectually fulfilling book, Britt tells us that, due to modern technology, fungi are now known to be "more ubiquitous than we thought" and are "much more important to the environment and, by extension, to ourselves." He proceeds to justify these statements... Read more →
« March 2022 | Main | May 2022 »
An Exceptional Vintage
by Roberto — I had a dream. I believe it was greatly influenced by a paper I read recently. It describes the fungal populations and the metabolomics of Corvina grapes (Vitis vinifera L. cv. Corvina). For those of you not deeply steeped in winemaking, Corvina grapes serve as the staple for... Read more →
Fine Reading: A Brief History of Plasmids
by Roberto — That plasmids are autonomous replicating elements and that they can serve as excellent cloning vectors are facts most certainly well-known to STC readers. However, I venture to guess that the same cannot be said about the historical details of the when, how, and why... Read more →
Otherlands' Tour of Microbes Through Prehistory
by Janie — "It is the crucial paradox at the heart of paleontology that practically all our information about life comes only from death." This line from Thomas Halliday's 'Otherlands', of course, refers to the fossil record. So, it stands to reason that the entire field of paleontology is contingent upon microbes... Read more →
Mind the Frame (also on April 1st)
by Christoph — As you may know, STC has been on Twitter since August 2018. Mostly, we use this platform to announce our Monday and Thursday posts. Occasionally, we comment on tweets that we find interesting, sometimes directly or by re-tweeting them. Twitter being Twitter, not everything we re-tweet is... Read more →
How to Fine-Tune a Riboswitch
by Janie — It has the inklings of a lame biology joke, but in actuality has profound implications among microbial communities: What's the similarity between male moths and RNA? The answer is the ability to detect extremely specific compounds. Like male moths that can detect a single pheromone molecule... Read more →
A Lasting Memory
by Roberto — Almost forty years ago, I arrived in Boston to begin my job as an assistant professor in the micro department at Harvard Medical School. During my post-doc at Stanford, I had very much hoped to get a call from bacteriology at UC Davis. Instead, I got the call from... Read more →
In one step from commensal to mutualist (almost), part 2|2
by Christoph — I had concluded the first part by saying that I would now discuss what mutations Koga et al. (2022) found in two mutator E. coli lineages that allowed the bacteria to successfully "take over" from Pantoea sp. as symbionts in Plautia stali stinkbugs (termed "improved" lineages.) Here we go... Read more →