Small Things Considered

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 →

Unmasking an Ancient Scourge

by Ornob Alam | Nothing takes you back in time quite like DNA, not ancient documents, not cherished tales, not ageless chronicles. Anyone studying human history today must take stock of the remarkable information recorded in DNA. Major advances in DNA sequencing and its extraction from ancient bones and teeth now provide unprecedented windows into major events in human history... Read more →

Trans-Translation Part 2: Of Vibrios and Squids

by Janie | This New Year story begins with newly hatched baby bobtail squids. Each squid is translucent and barely the size of a grain of barley. As they swim around, the six pores on their heads ringed with mucus-coated cells snag passerby Vibrio fischeri from the water. Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – the genus Psychrobacter

by Christoph | What could be more chill­ing than to de­viate for once from our mot­to to "...em­pha­size the un­usual and the un­ex­pected phe­no­mena" and ta­king a look at a, well, slightly bor­ing group of psy­chro­phil­ic bac­te­ria? The ge­nus Psy­chro­bac­ter − the pre­fix psychro- comes from the an­cient Greek ψυχρός for cold, frozen − con­tains about 40 de­scribed spe­cies of... Read more →

Underground Highways

by Roberto | This photograph, taken from our book Life at the Edge of Sight, shows a network of almost invisible fungal filaments which, like miniature highways, wind their way around peaks and form bridges over valleys all within a minute amount of soil. Read more →