Small Things Considered

Meet the Xenophyophores!

by Chris Mah | So, following up with all of the NOAA deep-sea 'Okeanos Explorer' stuff, I've found that I am just fascinated  by these things called xenophyophores! The name means "Bearer of foreign bodies". But what are they? To put it simply, they are giant, deep-sea amoebas that live in large, sediment "houses" called "tests"... Read more →

A Snippet: Oceanic Conversations

by Elio | In the ocean, bacteria and eukaryotic microbes (mainly the phytoplankton) interact in various ways, some mutually beneficial, others detrimental. Many, perhaps most of these interactions, take place via chemical communications. If you had a hydro phone-like gadget that could detect chemicals instead of sound, the racket would be deafening. Yet, we know little about these goings-on. Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Extrusomes

by Elio | Extrusomes are nasty membrane-bound structures released by ciliates and flagellates. They come in a number of varieties, the best studied being the trichocysts of paramecia. These can be discharged by the thousands per cell in response to physical stimuli, including when attacked by predators. Instead of being used... Read more →

A Snippet: More Awesome Ocelloid Surprises

by Elio | Not long ago, we posted a piece entitled "The Awesomest Thing in Biology" in which we celebrated the mind-boggling com­plexi­ties of the ocelloid, an organelle that closely resemble the vertebrate eye – in a unicellular protist! It turns out that further surprises come our way... Read more →

The Awesomest Thing in Biology

by Elio | So says a blogger by the name of Psi Wavefunction regarding an eye-like structure of some protists called the ocelloid. She wrote this in a now defunct blog eponymously called 'The Ocelloid'. I couldn't agree with her more. The ocelloid is the structural and functional equivalent of the sophisticated eye of metazoans... Read more →

Super Mario, Super Sonic, Paramecium!

by Radwa Raed Sharaf | What could those three possibly have in common? Believe it or not, they all play the role of a lead action figure in kids’ video games. Hearing the latest edition of the German biotechnology news broadcast, I was surprised to learn that researchers of the Riedel-Kruse lab at Stanford... Read more →

Pictures Considered #24 : Ostreococcus tauri, the Smallest Known Eukaryote

by Elio | Ostreococcus tauri is about as small as a free-living eukaryote can get. Its disk-shaped cells are as small as 0.8 µm, which makes it possible to examine them by electron cryotomography. As reported in a paper from the Jensen lab, there is barely enough room in these cells... Read more →

Let's Not Forget Acetabularia

by Elio | If I asked you what was the experimental basis for the central dogma of biology (DNA makes RNA makes Protein), you would be likely to mention the classical findings that the transforming principle was DNA (Avery et al.) or that phages transfer DNA to the host (Hershey & Chase). However, it is unlikely that... Read more →

Five Questions About the Foraminifera

by Elio | The Foraminifera ("forams") are among the largest and most abundant of all unicellular organisms. They can reach 20 cm in length and 18 cm in width, and the shells surrounding them are even bigger, up to 30 cm in length. They have existed in prodigious numbers that the remnants... Read more →

Microbes or Not, Parasites All

by Elio | Parasites pose a problem for the semantically-oriented microbiologist. There is no question that unicellular parasites such as Giardia, Plasmodium, or Toxoplasma are microbes, thus we can appropriate them with impunity. But what about parasitic worms? They are clearly not microscopic* and are taxonomically apart from parasitic protist. Yet parasitic protists… Read more →