The genie has returned. (He first visited here) During a moonlit walk on the beach, you stub your toe against a bottle, which rolls against a rock and shatters. A genie is liberated, eager to grant you one wish. You ask for a microbiological laboratory fully equipped to your specifications. The genie grants you that but with the condition that you can study only one organism. Which would you choose?
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Well, if the djinn has supernatural abilities (the full funded microbiological lab is a good sign of this), I would argue that the one organism I would study would be the LUCA.
But you know how those deal with djinni go.
One ORGANISM? Well, in that case, I'd have to pick the genie. How cool would it be to have the first peer-reviewed paper on the gut microbiota of a supernatural being?
(Doubly useful if it turns out that some of the microbes also have supernatural powers and can, for example, grant my wish to have all the junkmail that piles up in my mailbox broken down and fermented to butanol for my car. I'd be ecstatic about that, even if I had to let some other lab do the detailed research on it.)
Elio says:
Your sense of humor and your microbiological savvy are a lethal combination!
Salmonella typhimurium. Second choice might be an Erwinia that infects an insect that destroys olives [three part symbiosis]. The Erwinia cannot be grown outside of the olive, so far. But maybe I would choose an extremophile.
Abe Eisenstark
Sporosarcina ureae, I enjoy the simplicity of the endospore formation. In the rod shaped bacteria the mother cell/developing endospore structural relationship makes some sense and is well studied. I am fascinated by the formation of an endospore inside the strict geometric confines of a coccus form... I'll admit a personal interest more than a profound one.
Elio replies:
I am hooked and will read more about this bug. Besides, what could be more profound than a personal interest?
No question, it would be bdelloid rotifers! Not only are they extremely interesting, "honorary" microbes (see Small Things Considered April 20, 2009 "The Scandalous Bdelloid Rotifers"), their genomes have two retroelements that look for all the world like retroviruses (Vesta and Juno), so I could exploit a loophole in the Genie's condition — three organisms for the price of one!
Well!! I can think of many individual and very important bacteria to choose. But this fantastic opportunity does not come around often. SO!! Let us think outside the box and adopt a wise-guy attitude on this one. After all if we have to do it for grants, we mind as well do it in this situation. The genie never specified the definition of organism. So we can consider a microbiota (a community of bacterial cells) a functional organism. After all many of us eukaryotes are a community of cells and we are considered an organism. So let us research away microbiotas and get a plethora of microorganisms studied in the process. Now, the trick here is deciding which microbiota to pick.
Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc)