Small Things Considered

Friend & Foe

by Christoph | In a post two month ago, I referred to 'defensive symbioses'. In a nutshell: one or more symbiotic bacteria produce a cocktail of antibiotics that provide protection of a eukaryotic host against an array of opportunistic bacterial and fungal pathogens. I introduced the term not in contrast but... Read more →

The Microbial Ecology of Chocolate

by Roberto | Being retired, I no longer get the opportunity to brainstorm with post-doctoral candidates hoping to join the lab about possible projects to pursue (an activity that I greatly enjoyed for many years). But ideas of interesting research areas in the microbial sciences still arise often in my mind. So I will, on occasion, use... Read more →

Biofilms Utilize Competition For Maximum Growth

Aaron Angerstein, Maria Isabel Rojas, and Yao Yao | Not long ago, perhaps while we were still in grade school, bacteria were thought to be lonely, independent and utterly unicellular organisms. Bacteria were seen as mere clones of their "mother" bacterium from which all fellow colony-inhabitants originated, perpetually competing for food and space. This, of course, was a gross... Read more →

Even More Antibiotics In The Nursery!

by Christoph | We had learned earlier that Philanthus triangulum  beewolves – solitary digger wasps that prey on bees, hence their name – employ a "cocktail" of nine different antibiotics to protect their offspring from detrimental fungal infections. The antibiotics are produced – I repeat from the earlier post – by a bacterial symbiont, 'Candidatus Streptomyces philanthi', which the... Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator – Um, Really?

by Christoph | Three months ago, I introduced to this blog "Ocean's Ti­ni­est Pre­da­tor" based on a very re­cent pa­per by Ka­men­na­ya et al. (2018) who claimed to have iden­ti­fied Braa­ru­do­sphae­ra bi­ge­lo­wii, a mem­ber of the pho­to­syn­the­tic al­gal clade Hap­to­phy­ta, as a pre­da­tor of the abun­dant ma­ri­ne Cya­no­bac­te­ri­um Pro­chlo­ro­coc­cus. Our rea­der Be­ne­det­to pointed out... Read more →

A Microbial Utopia: Cheese

by Nathan Jayne, Amanda Alker, and Nathalie Delherbe | Over the past decade, there have been many large scale attempts to characterize bacterial communities, from soil and ocean microbiomes to human microbiomes. There is even a collective effort to profile the Earth’s microbiome. Scientists are not only interested in knowing who is there and what they are doing, but also how... Read more →

Trial by Fire

by Roberto | If per chance you hear the phrase "press disturbance" you might conjure up images of chaotic news media. What with all the disturbing reports of fake news going around these days, who could blame you? At least, that was my first reaction when confronted with the term "press disturbance." But worry not reader, this post will... Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator

by Christoph | In popular terms, the marine food chain goes like this: "phytoplankton feed the zooplankton that feed the small fish (larvae) and crustaceans that feed the larger fish that feed the even bigger fish that feed us". Thus we have us, Homo sapiens, together with the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, and... Read more →

Dial "V" for Murder

by Christoph | If you read this blog fre­quent­ly and, per­haps, be­cause we "em­pha­si­ze the un­usu­al and the un­ex­pect­ed phe­no­me­na", you may feel a little, Um.., bor­ed to see yet ano­ther post on ho­ri­zon­tal gene trans­fer (HGT). But wait, we've ac­tu­al­ly touch­ed this to­pic in few­er than 30 of our 1,200+ posts. That's less than the... Read more →

More Sand Grains

by Christoph | What you see here in Figure 1d competes with a NASA photo from 2012 for the best shot of the Milky Way but – spoiler alert! – it's actually a close-up of some humble microbes gathered on a grain of sand. I concluded the previous post about bacteria on sand grains with the question: and where are the archea ? The reason for... Read more →