by Christoph — I dare say that every biologist was blown away when they, a decade ago or so, first saw pictures of spherical rosettes that choanoflagellates can and readily do form. Is this emergent multicellularity? Skilled microscopists had long been aware of such "rosettes" among (some) bacteria, but they never made it into the canon of bacterial shapes as they only form under certain growth conditions. Read more →
«Anything that can be regulated...
by Christoph — ...will be regulated» Thus goes a lesser‑known but tried-and-tested amendment of Murphy's law among molecular biologists. Practitioners, especially students struggling with their own first PCR and cloning experiments in the lab, are familiar with the original «Anythings that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.» I don't need to dwell... Read more →
A Whiff of ...Replication – Pendulisporaceae
by Christoph — Just to quote myself here: When microbiologists describe a previously unknown bacterium, they are mainly interested in its lifestyle, metabolism, morphology and cell cycle. And to continue with the self-quotation: For me, "getting to know" newbies always involves finding out how they initiate the replication of their chromosome(s)… Read more →
A Whiff of Taxonomy – Pendulisporaceae
by Christoph — Microbiologists have always been fascinated by myxobacteria, that is for over a hundred years, because of their lifestyle, coordinated swarm hunting, and their ability to form spore‑containing fruiting bodies, an easily visible but unique differentiation feat among bacteria. And for just as long, microbiologists have been tearing their hair out over the difficulties of cultivating these hunter-gatherers in the lab... Read more →
When shattered glass art evokes a scientific paper?
by Janie — Recently I stumbled across Simon Berger's shattered glass artwork, and was reminded of RNA-seq and transcriptomics, of all things. The Swiss artist's pieces each begin with a large pane of glass. He shatters the pane, sometimes by heavy blows via hammer that generate large fragments... Read more →
Oscillibacter and Cholesterol
by Roberto — From its humble beginnings as an inhabitant of the Japanese corbicula clam alimentary canal to center stage attention-getter as a cholesterol-lowering resident of the human gut, Oscillibacter has experienced a meteoric rise to stardom... Read more →
Of Terms in Biology: Kymogram
by Christoph — In his presentation at a meeting in Copenhagen last year, Johan Elf showed several kymograms. No, these are not fancy versions of pie charts that everyone knows, but an intuitively accessible visualization of the localization of macromolecular complexes in living bacterial cells as they change over time. Read more →
Hey flagellum, shift into reverse gear!
by Christoph — In a classical manual gearbox, a gearwheel is inserted between the countershaft and the drive shaft. This reverses the direction of rotation of the drive shaft. Flagella have found a smart solution to do without an additional gearwheel in their gearbox: They run their engine along the outside of a gearwheel or, if they reverse the direction of rotation, on its inside. Read more →
Never a Dull Enzyme
by Roberto — The tricarboxylic acid cycle enzyme citrate synthase from Synechococcus elongatus has the remarkable feature that it self-assembles into multimeric fractal shapes, specifically Sierpiński triangles. As Arthur Kornberg would have said: "Never a dull enzyme!"... Read more →
Of Terms in Biology: Phage–Plasmid (2|2)
by Christoph — In the first part of this piece on phage–plasmids (P–Ps), I focused on examples that are well known today, and on the fact that they are representatives of larger families with dozens of members, rather than peculiar solitary cases. Here now, in the second part, I will introduce some lesser-known examples of phage–plasmids. Read more →