The Blog in the Class­room

Note. Trans­fer­ring our more than 2,000 posts from one plat­form to an­other, Word­Press, is a cum­ber­some task. Thus, many of our posts still con­tain bro­ken links. We will fix this one by one. We ask for your pa­tience.

by Elio

Stu­dents in In­te­gra­tive Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, a grad­u­ate course taught jointly by the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at San Diego and the San Diego State Uni­ver­sity, could ful­fill an assign­ment by op­tion­ally an­swer­ing ei­ther one of two spec­i­fied Tal­mu­dic Ques­tions. Their an­swers are now posted as com­ments un­der each of the posts. They make good read­ing.

Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion #30. Many bac­te­ria, e.g., E. coli and B. sub­tilis, reg­u­late their gene ex­pres­sion via a large num­ber of dis­tinct de­vices that op­er­ate on al­most all con­ceiv­able bio­chem­i­cal lev­els. Why so many?

Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion # 6 X. With the buzz cre­ated by the dis­cov­ery of gi­ant viruses, e.g., Mimivirus, the dis­tinc­tion be­tween viruses and cells is said to get blurred. I main­tain that this is not the case be­cause the sin­gle most im­por­tant dis­tinc­tion is that viruses lose their cor­po­real in­tegrity, cells do not. What do you think? Are you a blur­rer or a non-blur­rer?