Small Things Considered

Fungomania 1. Who's The Biggest?

by Elio | Anyone can freely claim bragging rights for their favorite topic, but with caution. In this light, the assertion that a mushroom growing in either Michigan or Oregon is both the largest and oldest living thing is questionable. Read more →

Happy Birthday LTEE!

by Roberto | Come this Sunday, February 24, 2019, all of us at STC will be raising a celebratory glass in honor of the remarkable LTEE, the E. coli long-term evolution experiment, which will be reveling in its 31st birthday. Read more →

Inside Earth, Microbes Approach Immortality

by Jennifer Frazer | Last December, the Deep Carbon Observatory an­nounced an astounding fact: the mass of the mi­crobes living beneath Earth's surface amounts to 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon, a sum some 245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans. That's amazing. It wasn't so long ago we weren't even sure life at depth was possible. Read more →

Go Ahead, Prove that Eukaryotic Cells AroseVia Endosymbiosis

by Elio | Say you want to prove once and for all the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells, substantiating that a cell (according to many, an archaeon) acquired a bacterium that eventually morphed into a mitochondrion. Read more →

State of the World's Fungi

by Roberto | We want to bring to your attention an outstanding new report on fungi from the Kew Royal Botanic Garden. It makes for great reading and clearly points out the many roles that fungi play on the functioning of Earth's biosphere. Read more →

Mono Lake (a Snippet)

by Elio | Travel down the eastern slope of California's Sierra Nevada and you will run into a number of breathtaking sights. Ranking high among them is Mono Lake, a large shallow lake that sports a collection of strange limestone columns. Protruding some 30 feet above the water surface, these structures, known as chimneys, consist of calcium carbonate... Read more →

What To Do When You Run Out of a Cherished Symbiont?

by Elio | The answer is easy: pick up another one. This happens with the cicadas, those noisy insects that have been in the mindfulness of humans since antiquity. Cicadas, like aphids, psyllids, leafhoppers and others, feed on plant sap fluids, which are rich in sugars but poor in amino acids and vitamins. Read more →

Why, oh, why, can't life be less complicated ?

by Christoph | It could all be so easy! Take a bacterial cell, say, a single E. coli  cell with all its ~4,300 genes nicely strung like pearls on the neck­lace of its single circular chromosome. Present this E. coli  cell with so­mething to eat and it starts growing and, while growing, replicates its chromosome starting at oriC, the unique replication origin. When the cell has reached twice its original size and now con­tains two chro­mo­so­mes, the cell divides... Read more →

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 →

How To Turn An E. coli Into An Archaeon (Sort Of)

by Elio | Things pop up in microbiology that are truly astounding. The claim that one can partially turn a bacterium into an archaeon rates high on this list. Archaea and Bacteria belong to different main branches of the tree of life and have many distinctive biochemical and structural differences. Read more →