Small Things Considered

Of Terms in Biology: Bacterial Fitness

by Elio | Broadly speaking, fitness in microbiology is the ability of microbes to thrive in a competitive environment. It is often determined by comparing the growth rate in a given environment of a mutant strain with that of its non-mutant isogenic relative. If the mutant is less fit, it will grow more slowly... Read more →

Fast Is Good...

by Michael Schmidt | Every now and then you read a paper and think to yourself, this might transform patient care. Such was the case when I read a paper suggested to me by one of our faithful TWiM (This Week in Microbiology) listeners, Dr. Volkan Ozenci of the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden. The paper, Antibiotic susceptibility... Read more →

How Much Does Biology Weigh?

by Elio | The very last thing that happened to me at the June 2018 ASM's Atlanta meeting (Microbe 2018) was a particularly rewarding coincidence. As I was ready to step on an escalator at the convention center, ready to go to the airport, a young man stopped me and asked to talk to me. It was... Read more →

Why You Must Plot Your Growth Data On Semi-log Graph Paper

by Elio | Take our word for it. For experiment involving growing cells, bacterial or otherwise, God meant you to pay attention to the condi­tions of growth. He also meant you to plot the results of a growth ex­periment on semi-log paper. Why? Plotting the log of the number of cells versus time buys you... Read more →

Pictures Considered #46. Fairy Lights (nanometer scale)

by Christoph | This post features electrons, which are among the smallest things possible. There are, of course, even much smaller things than electrons but this blog keeps clear of the quantum realm, most of the time. Yet to make up for the electrons' teensyness – if they could keep still some 4 × 10²¹ would fit into... Read more →

Pictures Considered #45. A Gauze Bandage

by Christoph | What resembles a snippet of a gauze ban­dage, a fabric made by the 'warp and weft' tech­ni­que of weav­ing on a loom, is ac­tu­al­ly an elec­tron-mi­cro­sco­pic pic­ture of a frag­ment of the sheath of the ar­chae­on Me­tha­no­trix con­ci­lii that grows in fi­la­ments si­mi­lar to many cy­a­no­bac­te­ria. The pic­ture – I see it as a piece... Read more →

Petri's dish vs. Winogradsky's column – shifting boundaries between purity and mixture of microbes

by Mathias Grote | There is more to say about these two articles of glassware other than the fact that every microbiologist knows that both were invented almost exactly 130 years ago by their respective epo­nyms, the German Julius Richard Petri and the Russian-French Sergei N. Wino­grad­sky. Read more →

Stalking Caulobacter

by Christoph Weigel | When it comes to cellular differentiation in bac­te­ria, two model systems stand out in my mind: sporulation in Bacillus subtilis and the two different cell morphologies in Caulobacter cres­cen­tus. Both systems have in common that dramatic changes in cell mor­pho­lo­gy, are easi­ly ob­served in the microscope. In the case of B. sub­ti­lis  spore formation a number of stress signals can derail the cell from its default cell cycle... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: FRET

by Christoph Weigel | FRET is the commonly used acronym for "Förster resonance energy transfer", which sounds just as awe-inspiring as it actually is. One has to dive deep into quantum mechanics and Jablonski diagrams to understand how 'non-radiative intermolecular dipole coupling' works. But fortunately, FRET can be explained in terms that not so physics-savvy microbiologists can... Read more →

Microbe 2017

by Elio | The annual meeting of the ASM, called Microbe, took place in New Orleans, June 1-5, 2017. I was there and not just for the crawfish etufée. A few notable changes from the customary routine were in evidence. Read more →