Displaying posts categorized under

Microbiology

Book Review: Small and Packs a Punch

A Planet of Viruses Carl Zimmer The University of Chicago Press 109 pages Interesting things happen when physicists decide to go into biological research. They ask questions that biologists generally won’t. For example, viruses have small genomes, but they also have very small storage space in their capsids. Bacteriophages inject their genetic material into the […]

Ratting out landmines and tuberculosis

  Thanks to John Stevenson for drawing my attention to this one: Giant African Pouched Rats are trained as detectors; a good solution for low-income countries and communities. HeroRATS, as they are called, come in two “models”: landmine detectors and tuberculosis detectors. Rats born in captivity (captured rats are impossible to train) are trained to […]

Why are there no (or almost no) disease-causing Archaea?

Some microbes are evil minions of Hell (but not all) Quite a few people think that microbes are evil, disease causing minions of Hell that should be eradicated. Supermarkets are handing out sanitary wipes: wipe the handlebar if you want to live, never mind that 90% of the food in the supermarket is worse for […]

Humans draw the LINE at Gonorrhea. Not that it helps.

א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה וְאֶל-אַהֲרֹן לֵאמֹר.  ב דַּבְּרוּ אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, וַאֲמַרְתֶּם אֲלֵהֶם:  אִישׁ אִישׁ, כִּי יִהְיֶה זָב מִבְּשָׂרוֹ–זוֹבוֹ, טָמֵא הוּא.  ג וְזֹאת תִּהְיֶה טֻמְאָתוֹ, בְּזוֹבוֹ:  רָר בְּשָׂרוֹ אֶת-זוֹבוֹ, אוֹ-הֶחְתִּים בְּשָׂרוֹ מִזּוֹבוֹ–טֻמְאָתוֹ, הִוא.  ד כָּל-הַמִּשְׁכָּב, אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁכַּב עָלָיו הַזָּב–יִטְמָא; וְכָל-הַכְּלִי אֲשֶׁר-יֵשֵׁב עָלָיו, יִטְמָא. , The day after Valentine’s Day. Ah! What better day in the year can we find […]

Playboy Pleasure Palace Provides Pneumophila?

It seems like an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease (in a mild form, Pontiac Fever)  has occurred at the DOMAINFest this year at Santa Monica, California. Legionnaire’s disease  is caused by gram-negative bacterium, Legionlla pneumophila. Legionella typically inhabits the water tanks of central air conditioning systems, but any aerosolized  fresh water such as from fog machines […]

The Oxygen Rush: late January, all of February and a Day in November

I have just returned from British Columbia in Canada. I have to admit that their license plate motto is quite accurate: BC is incredibly beautiful. Another thing that struck me is the provincial flag of BC: the Union Jack at the top (OK, it is British Columbia), there are white and blue horizontal stripes, and […]

A new life form? Not so fast

So everybody is excited about the new GFAJ-1 bacterium that Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues have discovered. A common buzzphrase diffusing through the media and blogosphere is “NASA discovers a new  life form“. (Or, better yet alien life.) Big press conference, and I just finished going through  the article that Wolfe-Simon and colleagues have published in Science. Great […]

Now that’s a f***ing big genome!

It isn’t junk DNA: God just commented out a lot of crappy code as he rolled out releases. — An old bioinformaticians’ joke (Hey, I never said it was a funny joke…) Why are some genomes so big? I mean, seriously. Why would the marbled lungfish with a genome weighing 132.83 picograms (pg) need an […]

Life serves viruses

Sometimes I get the feeling that all life on Earth basically serves as a vehicle for viral replication and propagation. Viruses thrive in all three domains, they embed themselves in all creature’s genomes, they may lie dormant in the genome for eons or decimate whole populations in a few years, and they are the most […]

Attack of the Giant Archaea

Archaea are under-rated. For one, most people don’t really know they exist – and if they do archaea are thought of as a type of bacteria. This goes not only for the general public also for some of my non-microbiology colleagues. (I had to correct quite a few “archaeobacteria” utterances.) The discovery that Archaea are a […]

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference

Quick post: at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Conference. I’m a bad microblogger, but thankfully Jonathan Eisen and Ruchira Datta are doing a great job of covering this conference live. There is a friendfeed room. The Twitter hashtag is #LAMG10.  The science, people, food and location are all great. My student, David Ream, is presenting […]

Predator MX: Jack the Rippler

No, not a new hunter-killer drone, neither is it the n+1 installment in the sci-fi horror series. Rather, Myxococcus xanthus. Again.     M. xanthus is a highly cooperative bacterium, as we have already seen: when starved, most cells “commit suicide” while a few form spores, to survive the lean times. But M. xanthus also […]

When is it a good idea to cheat?

I have written before about bacterial cooperation, and how cheating works, up to a point, in an environment of bacterial cooperation. That post talked about bacterial quorum sensing, the collective signaling mechanism by which bacteria construct supra-cellular structures called biofilms. Biofilms are tough multicellular enclosures that allow bacteria to survive and thrive in hostile environments, […]

I can’t hear you, the bacteria are too noisy

Much too noisy. When looking at a population of genetically identical bacteria, the number of proteins they produce varies. The picture below shows the levels of one type of protein that was fused to a green fluorescent protein (so we can see it): clearly there is a variation in how much of the protein each […]

The Third Reviewer added Microbiology

The Third Reviewer is a website for those of us who would rather show up to a journal club late, beer in hand and in their pajamas. Which means basically 100% of all scientists I know. TTR pulls feeds form multiple journals, and posts the abstracts on its site for us to comment upon; anonymously […]