Small Things Considered

A Paramecium, a Purple Bacterium, and a Green Alga Walk into a Bar…

by Janie | "Three to tango" makes yet another appearance in endosymbioses, this time in the form of a purple-green ciliate that is home to both purple bacteria and green algae. At first glance, this seems like a paradox... Read more →

Yiddish and Microbiology, Maybe

by Elio | In a recent twilight dream, I pondered if there was a connection between Microbiology and Yiddish. Read more →

For Bacteria, Mating can be a Stressful Business

by Anna Dragoš | Bacteria live in microbial jungles where they constantly must cope with siblings exploiting their food, predators trying to eat them, or hostile strains shooting at them with antibacterial weapons. Through billions of years of evolution... Read more →

Other Support

by Roberto | Here's something that I suspect many STC readers, particularly those applying for funding, will sympathize with. Read more →

TWiM 247: Therapy With Paleofeces and Phages

TWiM explores whether ‘rewilding’ is a way to get back our missing gut microbes, and failure of bacteriophage therapy due to the production of neutralizing antibodies. Read more →

Pictures Considered #54 : Mitochondria can't swim...

by Christoph | ...and get pushed around in­stead. Not equip­ped with fla­gel­la for pro­pel­ling or Type IV pi­li for twit­ching they can't ac­tive­ly move. But one step at a time. If you re­call what you know about mi­to­chon­dria, you may pic­ture them as ovoid or bean-shaped or­gan­el­les, house­mates float­ing in the eu­kar­yo­tic cyto­plasm. They are... Read more →

Talmudic Question #188

Best we know, which contains the largest number of species: the Bacteria, the Fungi, or the Protists? Read more →

The Life of an RNA Molecule, Through a Phase-Separation Lens

by Janie | Inside of a cell, some biomolecules cluster together to behave as a liquid. These liquids can reversibly form distinct phases, like the classic example of lava lamps, where mineral oil blobs slip and slide off the water-and-alcohol mix. This is liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS)... Read more →

Fine Reading: Did You Know That Algae Can Be Pathogens?

by Elio | Not all of us, me in­clud­ed, are ful­ly aware that the al­gae in­clude pa­tho­gens of many ver­te­bra­tes, such as hu­mans and do­mes­ti­cat­ed ani­mals. The most im­port­ant ones are Pro­to­the­ca bo­vis (once P. zopfii) and P. wicker­hamii. A fine over­view of this sub­ject by Shave, Mill­yard and May from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bir­ming­ham, UK, has been... Read more →

Paradigm Shifts, Paradigm Drifts

by Elio | In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book of se­mi­nal im­port­ance, The Struc­ture of Scien­ti­fic Re­vo­lu­tions"se­ries of peace­ful in­ter­ludes punc­tua­ted by in­tel­lec­tu­al­ly vio­lent re­vo­lu­tions," in which "one con­cept­ual world view is re­placed by another." Pa­ra­digm shifts oc­cur... Read more →