by Elio
Hermit crab from a cold seep site sampled during seeps voyage on RV Tangaroa. Note the seep-associated bacterial filaments on its claws (furry-looking covering). Deep Sea News: February 23, 2007. Image courtesy of NOAA/NIWA.
Deep-Sea News is featuring a Microbial Week, September 9–15, 2007, during which time they will be posting articles highlighting the many roles of microbes in the deep sea. An interesting excursion.
by Elio — Names matter a great deal in science, as, obviously, they do in all human endeavors. To a scientist, the name of the author, or the authors, of a publication is particularly cogent since a scientific discovery is frequently associated with the name or names of the discoverer (notably, Avogadro's number, Halley's comet, Watson & Crick DNA structure (omitting Rosalind Franklin, of course), etcetera). I should note...
by Elio — Prof. Salyers' contributions to microbiology as well as the quality of her teaching are widely known and much admired. Her lab provided important tools for the genetic dissection of Bacteriodes and its metabolism of complex carbohydrates. More broadly, she pointed to the importance of the human microbiome well before it…
by Christoph — ...will be regulated» Thus goes a lesser‑known but tried-and-tested amendment of Murphy's law among molecular biologists. Practitioners, especially students struggling with their own first PCR and cloning experiments in the lab, are familiar with the original «Anythings that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.» I don't need to dwell...
by Elio — A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. "I'll grant you one wish, oh Master," says the genie...
by Elio — Are there instances of water-containing sites on Earth that (pardon the expression) have not yet been metagenomicized? Surely many remain, but their numbers must be dwindling quite rapidly.
by Elio — What is stranger, the fact that hopanoids are possibly the most abundant organic compounds on the planet or that, despite being of microbial origin, most microbiologists have barely heard of them? Just as inexplicable is that a PubMed search for "hopanoid" brings up a paltry total of 102 entries ("DNA" brings up 1,443,241 items!) To drive the point home, there are...
