by Christoph
Streptomyces stacks Z-rings... into ladders inside its aerial/sporogenic hyphae. If this sentence strikes you as a barrage of jargon or just gibberish, don't despair, help is coming. First, enjoy the "light show" in the 20‑second video clip on the right side. It runs in loop, so you can follow more than...
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Pictures Considered #52 : Streptomyces stacks Z-rings...
Pictures Considered #51 : Headful Packaging, Literally...
by Christoph
For more than two decades we have known that the double-stranded DNA of phages is neatly rolled up in their capsids and fills them completely. Cerritelli et al. (1997) have demonstrated this for coliphage T7, and later Jiang et al. (2006) for Salmonella phage ε15. Yet, with a length of ~40 kb, both phages have more 'medium sized' genomes, and it is fine to learn now...
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Pictures Considered #50 : The Four Kingdoms of Nature
by Christoph
We often talk sloppily of «algae» or «protists» on these pages when we consider, rarely enough, unicellular eukaryotes. For my part, I attach little importance to biological systematics or taxonomy per se because I'm more interested in learning how living beings go about their business than in sorting them into various drawers. Therefore I mostly confine myself to the names of the...
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Pictures Considered #49 : C-Reactive Protein
by Elio
Among the blood tests that your doctor may prescribes is the one for C-Reactive Protein (CRP). What is it? CRP is a protein made by the liver in response to inflammation anywhere in the body, so a positive result will alert the physician that something along those lines is going on some place within you.
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Pictures Considered #48 : Contributions to the Biology of the Bacilli
by Roberto
It was fifteen or twenty years ago, I can't recall the year any more. But I vividly remember walking into Harvard's Farlow Botany Library, being shown to a seat next to an elegant wooden table, and asked to don a pair of white gloves. The protocol stemmed from the fact that I had requested to see an original of the second volume of the journal Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen (Contributions to the Biology of Plants), from 1876.
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Pictures Considered #47 : Phages in the Gardens
by Roberto
A few weeks ago, I found myself aimlessly exploring the garden of the Palace of Holyroodhouse (Edinburgh, Scotland), which has served as the principal residence of the Kings and Queens of Scots since the 16th century.
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Pictures Considered #46 : Fairy Lights (nanometer scale)
by Christoph
This post features electrons, which are among the smallest things possible. There are, of course, even much smaller things than electrons but this blog keeps clear of the quantum realm, most of the time. Yet to make up for the electrons' teensyness – if they could keep still some 4 × 1021 would fit into...
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Pictures Considered #45 : A Gauze Bandage
by Christoph
What resembles a snippet of a gauze bandage, a fabric made by the 'warp and weft' technique of weaving on a loom, is actually an electron-microscopic picture of a fragment of the sheath of the archaeon Methanotrix concilii that grows in filaments similar to many cyanobacteria. The picture – I see it as a piece...
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Pictures Considered #44 : The Utter Magic of kDNA
by Elio
Kinetoplast DNAs (kDNA) are the most startlingly complex and unexpected DNA structures anywhere. Superlatives do not suffice, as you will see. kDNAs are found only in the kinetoplasts of flagellates, structures involved in chromosome segregation, which is probably the reason why they may not be as well known...
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Pictures Considered #43 : The Sinking of René Descartes?
by Christoph
Today, I deviate from STC's habit to present in our Pictures Considered series one of the "visual highlights" of biology – iconic drawings, sketches, photographs, autoradiograms or electron micrograms that convey as much insight as lengthy texts (at least for those contemporaries equipped with more strongly developed visual perception ).
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