by Roberto
A quarter of the world's population – that's two billion people – is estimated to be latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This staggering number is often presented in scientific publications, used by funding agencies for strategic planning, and taught to students (I've done this myself). But where does this number come from?
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Latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infections
Patterns to Structures
by Christoph
I first saw this image a while ago on Twitter (now 𝕏) and I will put down a few thoughts about it here because it illustrates so well how microscopists, especially cryo-electron tomographers, work. And what distinguishes their way of working from that of artists and where the two meet.
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Updating Horizontal Gene Transfer
by Mechas and Roberto
We recently prepared a lecture that included a brief discussion of bacterial evolution. Of course, we covered horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which we consider a key pillar in the evolutionary process. We dutifully began our presentation by listing, perforce: transformation, conjugation, and transduction.
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AvL, Taste, and the Discovery of Bacteria
by Roberto
Before approaching matters of taste, I'll explain AvL. To many of our readers, the meaning of the acronym will be immediately apparent. But to others, perhaps those newer to microbiology, it may have no meaning at all. AvL is short for Antonie van Leeuwenhoek...
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Protein Synthesis – A Molecular Happening
by Roberto
More than fifty years ago, towards the end of Spring term in May 1971, university campuses across the U.S. were rife with protests over the Vietnam war. Students skipped classes and left labs to participate in marches and sit-ins. In addition, the memory of Woodstock (August 1969) was still fresh in everyone's mind.
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A Post-Human Biosphere
by Roberto
Only very rarely have I had the experience of serendipitously running into an article that is entertaining, hugely informative, and shocking all at once. It happened last week and I feel utterly compelled to provide brief comments interspersed among quotes from sections that I found particularly striking and thought provoking.
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Pictures Considered #60: Vibrio cholerae harpooning DNA
by Christoph
Let me start with an adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. Can this also be valid for video snippets? I think so. Here you see a few seconds of a looping video showing how a cholera bacterium extends a pilus, attaches the tip to DNA in the environment, and then retracts it. Worth a thousand words? Yes, sure, but also deserving 1,000 words...
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Emiliania huxleyi : Past, Present and Future
by Roberto
Christoph recently brought to my attention a resource for anyone interested in a brief introduction to coccolithophores, with particular emphasis on Emiliania huxleyi. Christoph knew well that I, as a fan of this microalga, would enjoy the site. This got me thinking about Ehux (its endearing name that many use) yet once more.
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Pictures Considered #58: Visualizing Introns
When we talk about genes and genomes today, we almost reflexively thinks of long strings of the letters G, A, T, and C. And by reading sequences, we easily detect stretches that code for proteins. We detect promoters, transcription factor binding motifs, start/stop signals for transcription, signals where introns are removed by splicing from primary transcripts... Read more →
An Illustrated Tree
by Roberto
From the fundamental concepts of biology, the fact that all organisms now alive share a common ancestor (LUCA) ranks as one of my favorites. When I pause to consider that, despite four billion years of evolution and divergence, my ribosomal RNA shares some stretches of sequence identity with all other autonomous organisms, I still get goose bumps...
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