Small Things Considered

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 →

Non-Photosynthetic Bacteria Also Have a Circadian Rhythm

by Elio | The very first entry in this blog, in December 2006, was about the amazing fact that some photosynthetic cyanobacteria have a circadian rhythm. I entitled it "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." Read more →

Interplanetary Biomining

by Elio | We are not short of evidence that microbes can survive in space for extensive times. A favored way to find out is to carry out often multinational studies by placing sample organisms on the surface of the International Space Station. Read more →