Small Things Considered

Tainted

by Vivienne Baillie Gerritsen | It has happened to all of us. You are seated in a good restaurant and the waiter has just brought you the wine you ordered. He solemnly shows you the label. You nod, and he proceeds to slit open the lead seal with the tip of his corkscrew. Pealing the seal off the bottle neck, he then... Read more →

Why, oh, why, can't life be less complicated ?

by Christoph | It could all be so easy! Take a bacterial cell, say, a single E. coli  cell with all its ~4,300 genes nicely strung like pearls on the neck­lace of its single circular chromosome. Present this E. coli  cell with so­mething to eat and it starts growing and, while growing, replicates its chromosome starting at oriC, the unique replication origin. When the cell has reached twice its original size and now con­tains two chro­mo­so­mes, the cell divides... Read more →

How To Turn An E. coli Into An Archaeon (Sort Of)

by Elio | Things pop up in microbiology that are truly astounding. The claim that one can partially turn a bacterium into an archaeon rates high on this list. Archaea and Bacteria belong to different main branches of the tree of life and have many distinctive biochemical and structural differences. Read more →

On Bacteria Getting Fat

by Roberto | In bacteria and archaea, lipids seem to be found mainly in the cell membrane. Can you think of possible functions for lipids elsewhere in bacterial and/or archaeal cells? On first inspection, these two opening sentences have the makings of an STC Talmudic Question. Except for the fact that intracellular fat accumulation or, more precisely, cytoplasmic lipidic inclusions... Read more →

Biofilms Utilize Competition For Maximum Growth

Aaron Angerstein, Maria Isabel Rojas, and Yao Yao | Not long ago, perhaps while we were still in grade school, bacteria were thought to be lonely, independent and utterly unicellular organisms. Bacteria were seen as mere clones of their "mother" bacterium from which all fellow colony-inhabitants originated, perpetually competing for food and space. This, of course, was a gross... Read more →

Ocean's Tiniest Predator – Um, Really?

by Christoph | Three months ago, I introduced to this blog "Ocean's Ti­ni­est Pre­da­tor" based on a very re­cent pa­per by Ka­men­na­ya et al. (2018) who claimed to have iden­ti­fied Braa­ru­do­sphae­ra bi­ge­lo­wii, a mem­ber of the pho­to­syn­the­tic al­gal clade Hap­to­phy­ta, as a pre­da­tor of the abun­dant ma­ri­ne Cya­no­bac­te­ri­um Pro­chlo­ro­coc­cus. Our rea­der Be­ne­det­to pointed out... Read more →

A Microbial Utopia: Cheese

by Nathan Jayne, Amanda Alker, and Nathalie Delherbe | Over the past decade, there have been many large scale attempts to characterize bacterial communities, from soil and ocean microbiomes to human microbiomes. There is even a collective effort to profile the Earth’s microbiome. Scientists are not only interested in knowing who is there and what they are doing, but also how... Read more →

Microbes Make the Most of Milk

by Rachel Diner | For the first year of our lives most of what we eat is milk. In fact, during the first four months it is the only thing we eat. For mothers, both breast milk and formula are popular options for getting a baby nourished, and while both breast milk and formula have the essentials needed to survive,... Read more →

The Way Up and The Way Down

by Elio | I admit to not having paid much attention to the mechanisms that plants and animals use to stand up straight, or, in the case of plants, also to descend into the soil. Yet, on reflection, the skill in detecting the effect of gravity, now called gravitropism, the older term being geotropism, is essential for life. Read more →

Good Reading: Bacterial communication through electrical signaling

by Ananya Sen | Bacterial biofilms are microbial communities within which individual cells communicate with each other. Establishing a biofilm, coordinating biofilm growth in response to nutrient availability, and interspecies interactions, all depend on communication. Read more →