Small Things Considered

Cell Division in Bacteria: Themes & Variations

by Elio | From bacteria on up, all the way to the cells of our bo­dies, most cells di­vide by bi­na­ry fis­sion. That is, the pro­cess ini­tiat­es at mid­cell, usu­al­ly by con­strict­ion, and pro­ceeds un­til the two re­sult­ant daugh­ter cells be­come se­pa­rat­ed. Most of­ten, these two sis­ter cells are iden­ti­cal in size and shape. Boring. En­ter Ba­cil­lus sub­tilis... Read more →

Color is in the Eye of the Bacteria-Beholder

by Janie | Pigmentation is a straightforward colora­tion: the color is the same from every viewing angle. In contrast, structural col­oration is in the eye of the beholder: the colors are dependent on the viewing angle... Read more →

Prokaryotic Organelles. Yes, There Are Such Things.

by Elio | One of the venerable distinctions between eukaryotes and prokaryotes used to be that prokaryotes do not have organelles. This distinction has now gone by the wayside because bacteria and archaea have been shown to possess protein bound structures that can appropriately be called organelles. Read more →

All the World Is Not E. coli

by Elio | Like most people interested in bacterial physiology, I spent much of my life with the nearly religious persuasion that the starting condition for studying growth is when cells and their constituents all increase in unison. In practice, such "balance growth" is achieved when bacteria grow exponentially at low concentrations... Read more →

Cyanobacteria fly kites? Come on...

by Christoph | You've probably heard of spiders that fly with­tout wings. They climb on­to flow­ers or leaves, stand on their tip­toes, and push gos­sam­er threads of silk from their spin­nerets, glands in their ab­domen, and take off. They do that to reach a near­by twig when weav­ing their webs or to make long-dist­ance flights, some­times over... Read more →

100-Million-Year-Old Seafloor Sediment Bacteria Have Been Resuscitated

by guest author Jennifer Frazer
In 2010, Japanese scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Expedition 329 sailed into the South Pacific Gyre with a giant drill and a big question... Read more →

Bacterial Blues

by Janie | The color blue is an oddity. Of all pigments in nature – chemicals that selectively absorb and reflect certain wave­lengths of visible light – blue ones are among the rarest. Pro­ducing blue dyes was once such a costly business that medieval Europeans consid­ered it to be as precious as gold... Read more →

Our (Previously) Purple Planet

by Gillian Belk | A flying saucer hurtles into our solar system, swings past Mercury and Venus, and comes to rest hovering over Earth, 3.7 billion years ago, deep during the Archean. The aliens peer down and ponder a planet as foreign to them as it would be to us. Read more →

A Brief History of Biofilm Research

by George O'Toole | I have studied bacterial biofilms since I joined Roberto Kolter's lab at Harvard Medical School in 1995. I "discovered" biofilms as I was finishing my graduate work at Wisconsin and continued tracking the literature backwards after I joined Roberto's lab. The oldest reference I could find was from the 1920s – a Navy report on hull biofouling cited in another paper I had read. Read more →

Fine Reading. Proximate and ultimate causes of the bactericidal action of antibiotics

by Elio | In a Perspective piece in Nature Reviews Microbiology, Fernando Baquero of the Ramon y Cajal University Hospital in Madrid and Bruce R. Levin of the Antibiotic Resistance Canter at Emory University present a most thoughtful essay on the ways antibiotics kill bacteria (or don't). To explain the curious title and what's behind it, let me quote their introductory paragraph: Read more →