Small Things Considered

The Vicissitudes of a Talmudic Question

by Elio | When we try to construct a Talmudic Question, we are con­cerned with the accuracy of the premise and ensuring that an answer has not been previously provided. We were toying with this one: “Bac­terial endosymbionts of insects have reduced genomes but, best we know, they have not exported some of their genes to the host cell nu­cleus (as organelles have)... Read more →

Blown Out of Proportion – The Role of ppGpp in Balanced Metabolism

by Elizabeth Mueller & Corey Westfall | Chocolate chip cookies are one of our guilty pleasures in the Levin Lab. They provide a satisfying, albeit unhealthy, avenue to celebrate success (or escape failure) in the lab. In addition to being warm, gooey, and delicious, a more practical attribute we appreciate is the scalability of the recipe: We can adjust the quantity of cookies we bake in proportion to our accomplishments or to the volume of ingredients in our kitchens without compromising the quality. Read more →

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 →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – Cycloclasticus

by Christoph | Whenever you stumble across the name of a bac­te­ri­al spe­cies you've ne­ver heard of be­fore you pro­bab­ly won­der what the heck that name wants to tell you. You're not alone, al­so mi­cro­bio­lo­gists often scratch their heads. Sure, they are fa­mi­liar with the ve­ne­rable tra­di­tion in all of bio­lo­gy to name spe­cies ac­cording to the rules... Read more →

Talmudic Question #162

Can you imagine a eukaryotic virus that can infect a bacterium or an archaeon? Read more →

Book Review: The Power of Plagues

by Daniel | Microbiology nonfiction books tend to fall into the acade­mic category, basically as curated collections of review articles that detail a relatively specialized niche of the field. At the other end of the spectrum lie those books written purely for a general audience that might bring in microbiological themes within a larger scope, usually human health. 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 →

Escape From the Wall

by Roberto | Who would have thought it? That the bac­terial cell wall would turn out to be so rea­di­ly dis­pen­sa­ble. Among the first les­sons I taught on bac­te­ri­al cell struc­ture was the fact that the ever pre­sent cell wall, com­posed pre­do­mi­nant­ly of pep­ti­do­gly­can, forms a pro­tec­tive shield around the cyto­plas­mic mem­brane. A shield that pre­vents the bac­te­ri­al cell... Read more →

Nano Pétanques – A Snippet

by Christoph | "The power of evolution is revealed through the di­ver­si­ty of life." Aha! It was so­lemn­ly de­clar­ed by the No­bel Prize com­mit­tee in their sta­te­ment an­nounc­ing last year's che­mis­try priz­es for "the di­rect­ed evo­lu­tion of en­zymes [and] phage dis­play of pep­tides and anti­bodies". Roy­al aca­de­mies – na­tio­nal or other aca­de­mies like­wise – tend to add luster... 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 →