Small Things Considered

The Hunger Games

by Elio |I am not usually drawn to start out an ar­ticle by con­si­der­ing a bac­te­ri­um's name, but when con­front­ed with Ag­gre­ga­ti­bac­ter ac­ti­no­my­ce­tem­co­mit­ans, I had to take a pause. A well-tra­vel­ed Gram-negative coc­co­ba­cil­lus, this car­rier of such a con­vo­lut­ed mo­ni­ker start­ed life simp­ly as an Ac­ti­no­ba­cil­lus... Read more →

Why Calcify?

by Roberto | Janie's re­cent Bio-Brick post, where she in­tro­duces mi­cro­bi­al­ly in­duced cal­cite pre­ci­pi­ta­tion, prompt­ed me to con­tinue on the to­pic. In con­trast to the amor­phous chalk Janie de­scribed, which is pro­duced by bac­te­ria from lime­stone, I'll be de­scrib­ing a ve­ry dif­ferent sort of chalk. Still cal­cium car­bo­nate, but with a com­ple­te­ly dif­fer­ent ge­ne­sis. Read more →

Transient Thoughts on Transduction

by Roberto | What with the all the talk about CRISPR, the renewed interest in phage therapy, the widespread occurrence of huge phages (to mention but a few of the reasons phage are constantly in the news these days), it's no exaggeration to say that once again in biology "phage are all the rage"... Read more →

Fine Reading: Evolution of Pathogen Tolerance

by Roberto | While reading a review yesterday, I recalled a conversation I had with a student nearly forty years ago. He did not appear interested in the subject of my lectures – bacterial genetics and physiology – so I was curious to know the reasons why. Read more →

Farewell San Francisco Sourdough?

by Roberto | Back in 1980, when I was a post-doc in the San Francisco Bay Area, I began to develop a taste for what I considered a truly unique bread: San Francisco sourdough. There was a certain mystique to it, everyone familiar with it claimed there was nothing like it anywhere else... Read more →

Rainfall and a Phyllosphere's Microbiota

by Mechas Zambrano and Roberto | Where do the microbes that colonize newly emerging ecosystems come from? Plants are ideal systems to address this fundamental question in microbial ecology. When a seed germinates, new ecosystems emerge as the plant grows and acquires its microbiota... Read more →

Extreme Living in the Atacama

by Roberto | This photograph resembles some of the images captured by the rover Perseverance and sent back to Earth from Mars. Instead, it was taken by a human at one the driest and most inhospitable places on Earth, the hyperarid Atacama Desert in northern Chile... Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – Radiolaria

by Roberto | The men­tion of Radiolaria al­ways brings to mind Ernst Haeckel's as­ton­ish­ing hand-drawn ima­ges, com­piled in his clas­sic plate col­lect­ion Art Forms in Na­ture. I'm always mes­mer­ized by the sym­metry and de­tail of his draw­ings of mi­cros­cop­ic ske­le­tons. Haec­kel's abi­li­ty to com­bine science and art is one as­pect of his re­mark­able career. His life pre­sents... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: The Biological Pump

by Roberto | Quick, without much think­ing, what image came to mind when you read "bio­lo­gi­cal pump" in to­day's title? If you are like me, pre­dis­posed to think in cel­lu­lar and mo­le­cu­lar terms, you might have thought of an in­te­gral mem­brane pro­tein that pumps mo­le­cules in­to or out the cell. Per­haps any of... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Alpha, Beta, Gamma Diversities

by Elio
In ecology, these terms refer to various le­vels of species diversities... Read more →