by Elio The southern end of the volcanic Kol- beinsey Ridge with its isolated seamounts perched on the Mid-Atlantic ridge north of Iceland. Source. We don't know about you, but we've become pretty blase about the stream of papers, each with the customary two dozen or more authors, reporting the comp...

We present here a lightly annotated list that includes most of our posts from the past half year. The Teachers’ Corner We recently added a new section to our blog, where the posts are organized in a more teacher-friendly format. We hope that this will increase the use of these articles in the clas...

We translate and offer a post from the Spanish blogs Curiosidades de la Microbiología (Curiosities of the Microbiological World) and Esos Pequeños Bichitos (Those Small Bugs). by Manuel Sánchez and Miguel Vicente Phylogenetic distribution of FtsZ protein. This protein is essential for many Bacter...

by Elio Picture a leading authority on algal genetics and ecology, a discoverer of fascinating microbes from many phyla, an accomplished poet, an Esperantist who translated Winnie the Pooh into that language, a wit, a philosopher, and a nice guy. You have pictured Ralph Lewin, who died in La Jolla, ...

by Elio The cedar aphid and a TEM of a cell containing two endo- symbiotic bacteria. Courtesy of A. Latorre and J. M. Gosalbes. Let me rephrase that. How many genomes does it take for an aphid to make tryptophan? If you thought it was one, you'd be wrong: the answer is two, neither being the aphidâ€...

by Elio Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen Friendly old girl of a town                    Wonderful Copenhagen, lyrics by Frank Loesser At the June General Meeting of the ASM in Boston, there was a session called From Bacterial Physiology to Cellular Ge...

by Elio Ah, that amazing innate immunity and those equally amazing ways microbes respond to it! There seems to be no end of the variations in the choreography of host and parasite. Here are two intriguing versions of that dance. Mimicry, a tool for E. coli to fool innate immunity Toll was discovered...

by Elio Long ago, I thought that reaching 72 years of age would be a reasonable accomplishment, as this would bring me into the new millennium. Done, some time ago. I now have no mileposts in mind, just a still horizon. If anything, it???s this blog that counts. So, let me tell you why this has been...

If you look for them, you'll find them—bacteria that can feed on antibiotics, that is. Here, looking means to make an enrichment culture using a medium whose single carbon source is an antibiotic. Add a soil sample with its resident bacteria and look to see who, if anyone, will grow. As reported i...

Image courtesy of BibliOdyssey Not so long ago, it would have seemed implausible that biology would return to its origins as a visual science. Some would have considered this a regression to the days when biologists were pretty much confined to studying just what they could see, such as the shapes o...