Microorganisms
clock | May 28, 2009If you ever glanced at the circadian literature, you have probably encountered the statement that "circadian rhythms are ubiquitous in living systems". In all of my formal and informal writing I qualified that statement somewhat, stating something along the lines of "most organisms living on or near the Earth's surface have circadian rhythms". Why?
In the earliest days of chronobiology, it made sense to do most of the work on readily available organisms: plants, insects, mammals and birds. During the 20th century, thousands of species of animals, fungi, protists and plants - all living on…
clock | January 28, 2009New microbiology aggregator just went live in Belgrade, built (as always) by Vedran Vucic.
clock | December 19, 2008You may have heard the story that Scarlett Johansson had a cold when she appeared on Jay Leno's show the other day. And you may have heard that she got the cold from her 'The Spirit' co-star Samuel L. Jackson. And you may have heard that she had to blow her nose into a tissue during the show. And you may have heard that this particular tissue is now up for sale on eBay. And you may have heard that all proceeds of this sale will benefit USA Harvest, the charity of Scarlett Johansson's choice.
What you may not know is that, due to the content of the tissue being regarded as biohazard (or even…
clock | August 7, 2008On Tuesday night, when I posted my personal picks from this week's crop of articles published in PLoS ONE, I omitted (due to a technical glitch on the site), to point out that a blog-friend of mine John Logsdon published his first PLoS ONE paper on that day:
It's a updated and detailed report on the ongoing work in my lab to generate and curate an "inventory" of genes involved in meiosis that are present across major eukaryotic lineages. This paper focuses on the protist, Trichomonas vaginalis, an organism not known to have a sexual phase in its life cycle.
Here is the paper (and check John's…
clock | May 16, 2008Ha! Made you look! Which is exactly the point! Go and add your own ideas in the comments there....
clock | May 11, 2008It takes 38 minutes for the E.coli genome to replicate. Yet, E.coli can bo coaxed to divide in a much shorter time: 20 minutes. How is this possible?
Larry poses the riddle and provides the solution.
The key is that complex biochemical processes are taught sequentially, one by one, because that is how we think and process information. Yet, unless there is a need for precise timing (in which case there will be a timer triggering the starts and ends of cellular events), most processes occur all the time, simultaneously, in parallel. How do we teach that?
clock | May 7, 2008Considering this I am kinda baffled by this. There is tons of microbial metagenomics and genomics in PLoS journals.
clock | February 20, 2008Brendan Bohannan, Richard W. Castenholz, Jessica Green and their students and postdcos at the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Oregon are currently doing a Journal Club on the PLoS ONE article The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition: Metagenomic Characterization of Viruses within Aquatic Microbial Samples, which is part of the PLoS Global Ocean Sampling Collection. Please join in the discussion.
clock | November 5, 2007My friend Franz, who runs a delightful blog Mikrob(io)log (in Slovenian) alerted me that the team of undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana won the iGEM 2007 at MIT the other day. They did it for the second year in a row (all brand new students, of course). The Ljubljana team won in the Health & Medicine category for their work on HIV-1 virus. One member of the team is Franz's student. Congratulations to the Slovenian team!
clock | October 2, 2007Journal Clubs are a popular feature on PLoS ONE papers. There were several of them in the spring. Now, after a brief summer break, the Journal Clubs are going live again and they will happen on a regular basis, perhaps as frequently as one per week.
What does it mean - a Journal Club? In short, a lab group volunteers to discuss one of the more recent (or even upcoming, not yet published) PLoS ONE papers and to post their discussion as a series of comments, annotations and ratings on the paper itself, triggering a discussion within a broader scientific community.
The first group that will…
clock | June 17, 2007Here is an example of perfect science blogging. It starts seemingly innocuously, with a quiz: Monday's Molecule #30, where you are supposed to figure out what the compound is.
Then, after a couple of days, there is a post that you may not even realize at first is related to the first one: Bacteria Have Cell Walls
Another day or two, and A and B get connected: How Penicillin Works to Kill Bacteria
But how do we know this? Well, some people figured it out: Nobel Laureates: Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Sir Howard Walter Florey - and now you know how we know.
Finally, putting…
clock | March 21, 2007Researchers Uncover Protection Mechanism Of Radiation-resistant Bacterium:
Results of a recent study titled "Protein Oxidation Implicated as the Primary Determinant of Bacterial Radioresistance," will be published in the March 20 edition of PLoS Biology. The study, headed by Michael J. Daly, Ph.D., associate professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), Department of Pathology, shows that the ability of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans to endure and survive enormous levels of ionizing radiation (X-rays and gamma-rays) relies on a powerful mechanism that…
clock | March 14, 2007Today is a big day on Plos-Biology for the Oceanic Microbial Diversity Genomics. Last night they published not one, not two, but three big papers chockfull of data.
Accompani\ying them are not one, not two, not three, not even four, but five editorial articles about different aspects of this work.
James has already homed in on one important part of the discovery: the preponderance and diversity of proteorhodopsins - microbial photopigments that are capable of capturing solar energy in a manner different from photosynthesis. As always, light-sensitive molecules are thought to be tightly…
clock | February 3, 2007A-ha! Finally! Now I understand the connection between Creationism and the overall anti-sex sentiment of the Fundamentalists!
New reseaarch shows that E.coli swim upstream due to the Design of their flagellum! And where do they swim from and swim to? Yes, you guessed it right! And you can also watch the movie.
clock | December 12, 2006Look through your blog's archives since November 16th. Have you written something about microorganisms? Viruses, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista? Basic biology, medical aspects or ecology of microorganisms? If not, can you write one today or tomorrow? Or perhaps you vividly remember a post written by someone else? Perhaps you know of a new blog that covers microbial topics?
In any case, send the permalinks to those posts to the next host of the Animalcules carnival - Tara of Aetiology.
clock | October 21, 2006A brief history of antibiotics and the resistance to them, resistant TB and resistance to Triclosan (antibacterial soap).
clock | October 11, 2006If you are not a North Carolina blogger you may have skipped over this earlier post in which I mention, among else, that a new blog was started right there and then, at the Blogger MeetUp.
Now, the blog is up and running and there is new content there. So, go say Hello to a new science blogger, Lorraine Cramer of Microblogology.
clock | September 20, 2006Paramecia Adapt Their Swimming To Changing Gravitational Force:
The researchers placed a vial with pond water and live paramecia inside a high-powered electromagnet at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Fla. The organisms are less susceptible to a magnetic field than plain water is, so the magnetic field generated inside the vial "pulls" harder on the water than on the cells. If the field is pulling down, the cells float. If it's pulling up, they sink.
Using water alone, Valles and Guevorkian were able to increase the effect of gravity by about 50 percent. To increase…