Small Things Considered

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 →

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 →

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 →

To Not Get Lost in the Trees of Life (ToL)

by Christoph | Which picture comes to your mind if you think of the 'Tree of Life' (ToL) ? Maybe it's Ernst Haeckel's venerable oak tree ? Or is it rather Carl Woese's famous "three domains" phylogenetic tree ? Al­though highly abstract, the latter still resembles a tree with stem and branches, at least as much as does the famous "I think" sketch by Char­les Dar­win, on page 36 in his Note­book B. Read more →

Fine Reading: A Chalk Talk

by Roberto | As a means of communicating science, chalk talks can be extremely effective way to engage the audience. These days such pre­sen­ta­tions have become part and parcel of the interview process of those seeking academic jobs in the life sciences. As much as I love such chalk talks, that's not what I will discuss today. Rather, I want to bring to your attention a... Read more →

Why Be Intracellular and Be Motile?

by Elio | Why would a strict intracellular organism be motile? In the case of rickettsiae (and some not strict intracellular parasites such as the listeriae and shigellae), motility is carried out through the activity of the host's actin, apparently for the purpose of infecting adjacent cells. I am not talking about that, but rather I will consider here... Read more →