Wel­come to Au­tumn

by Elio

This blog is in its eighth year, a fairly long life as blogs go. We con­tinue to en­joy shar­ing with you the ex­cite­ment of un­ex­pected and un­usual sto­ries of the mi­cro­bial world. Not all of it is the lat­est. You may have no­ticed if you visit this site with some fre­quency that we may not fa­vor the lat­est here in this blog. But look­ing back into our archives tells that we hardly missed any­thing im­por­tant ei­ther. In fact, the archive would serve quite well as 'sup­ple­men­tary ma­te­r­ial' for any vir­tual en­cy­clo­pe­dia of mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. Our new lay­out has a key­word search func­tion that lets you eas­ily ac­cess the 800+ en­tries in the archives. It gets you quicker to your fa­vorite topic than scrolling through the cat­e­gories.

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Of re­cent, we have had many con­tri­bu­tions from stu­dents, post­docs, and other guests. We en­joy this, in part be­cause times are chang­ing and so­cial me­dia have be­come key ve­hi­cles for sci­en­tific com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And this blog is a so­cial medium. Yet don't think that we do this to avoid work. On the con­trary, we are ded­i­cated ed­i­tors (and men­tors!) and spend a lot of time go­ing over the ma­te­r­ial we re­ceive.

What we use here is not the Royal We. This is dis­tinctly a team ef­fort, and our "we" is in­deed "we." The main con­trib­u­tors to this blog are listed on your right (on mo­bile: be­low). Less vis­i­ble, but no less im­por­tant, are two ad­di­tional team mem­bers who work for our spon­sor, the Amer­i­can So­ci­ety for Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. An­drea Gwart­ney is in charge of many tech­ni­cal as­pects of this un­der­tak­ing. Chris Con­dayan looks over the whole thing and has been with it since the very be­gin­ning. Hav­ing giv­ing proper credit where is due, let me re­vert to the first per­son to ex­press my deep ap­pre­ci­a­tion and ad­mi­ra­tion for everyone's phe­nom­e­nal skills and ded­i­ca­tion.

And don't for­get: you are also part of the team. We are ea­ger to hear from you, so send us your com­ments, crit­i­cisms, ideas, what­ever else comes into your mind. Thank you for vis­it­ing and en­joy the new aca­d­e­mic year.