Small Things Considered

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 →

Our (Previously) Purple Planet

by Gillian Belk | A flying saucer hurtles into our solar system, swings past Mercury and Venus, and comes to rest hovering over Earth, 3.7 billion years ago, deep during the Archean. The aliens peer down and ponder a planet as foreign to them as it would be to us. Read more →

Non-Photosynthetic Bacteria Also Have a Circadian Rhythm

by Elio | The very first entry in this blog, in December 2006, was about the amazing fact that some photosynthetic cyanobacteria have a circadian rhythm. I entitled it "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." Read more →

Interplanetary Biomining

by Elio | We are not short of evidence that microbes can survive in space for extensive times. A favored way to find out is to carry out often multinational studies by placing sample organisms on the surface of the International Space Station. Read more →

Trans-Translation Part 2: Of Vibrios and Squids

by Janie | This New Year story begins with newly hatched baby bobtail squids. Each squid is translucent and barely the size of a grain of barley. As they swim around, the six pores on their heads ringed with mucus-coated cells snag passerby Vibrio fischeri from the water. Read more →

Alcanivorax, an efficient cleaner of our oceans

by Joseph A. Christie-Oleza and Vinko Zadjelovic | The first image that comes to our mind when we think of the oceans is im­mense bo­dies of clear wa­ters or – in the more 'ro­man­tic' minds – beau­ti­ful tur­quoise wa­ters that caress tro­pi­cal beaches. Such clear waters come as a con­se­quen­ce of the ex­treme lack of nu­trients in these eco­sys­tems. Ne­ver­the­less, the ele­vat­ed pri­ma­ry pro­duction... Read more →

Underground Highways

by Roberto | This photograph, taken from our book Life at the Edge of Sight, shows a network of almost invisible fungal filaments which, like miniature highways, wind their way around peaks and form bridges over valleys all within a minute amount of soil. Read more →

Putting Life on Earth in Perspective

by Roberto | Last week I was very fortunate. I had the opportunity to focus my attention on putting life on Earth in perspective. It was a welcome respite considering these trying times. Almost one year ago, thanks to Nassos Typas, I received an invitation to speak on microbial diversity at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg... Read more →

Exploration, Streptomyces-style

by Roberto | The evolutionary trajectories of bacteria are great­ly in­fluen­ced by their re­pro­duc­tive suc­cess in chan­ging en­vi­ron­ments. Of course, this is not just about how fast bac­te­ria di­vide when con­di­tions per­mit growth but also how well they sur­vive in the ab­sence of growth. In ad­di­tion, an im­port­ant de­ter­mi­nant of the over­all fit­ness of a bac­te­ri­al lineage is... Read more →

A Novel Way to Kill Your Neighbor

by Elio | Ever wonder why that paradigm of bacterial signaling molecules, (p)ppGpp, uses guanosine (G) and not some other base (is this a Talmudic Question in the making?)? To remind you, guanosine tetraphosphate, ppGpp, (or the pentaphosphate, pppGpp, the two have pretty much the same activity), is the classic bacterial "alarmone"... Read more →