If Mi­crobes Could Tweet...

Or­ga­nized by Kara Schoen­e­mann, Belkys Sánchez, and Min­seon Kim. Tweets by mem­bers of the UT Hous­ton MMG De­part­ment.

by Daniel P. Haeusser

Each spring the De­part­ment of Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and Mol­e­c­u­lar Ge­net­ics at UT Hous­ton goes on our an­nual de­part­men­tal re­treat to Camp Allen for sci­ence, recre­ation, and fes­tiv­i­ties. Af­ter the first day of stu­dent and post doc talks we have our din­ner and a key-note speaker (this year we had a great talk from Tina Henkin from OSU).

If STC would tweet... (de­sign by the STC Team)

Then, be­fore the ever-pop­u­lar 'so­cial time' that ex­tends into the wee hours, the first year stu­dents are re­spon­si­ble for run­ning roughly an hour of 'Sci­ence Fun Time'. Typ­i­cally this con­sists of com­pet­i­tive games that may try and work in ways to em­bar­rass pro­fes­sors, and al­ways fea­tures a lot of laugh­ing. This year they did a ver­sion of Pic­tionary with mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy and mol­e­c­u­lar ge­net­ics themes.

The first years then fin­ished 'Sci­ence Fun Time' with a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion of If Mi­crobes Could Tweet... Prior to the re­treat, they so­licited de­part­ment mem­bers to con­tribute hu­mor­ous sam­ples of Twit­ter mes­sages that a mi­crobe would com­pose were they ca­pa­ble of tweet­ing. The pre­sen­ta­tion dis­played all the anony­mous sub­mit­ted en­tries, re­pro­duced be­low for your en­joy­ment. Some are a lit­tle es­o­teric, but many should be clear to any­one with some mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy knowl­edge.

If you know all about Twit­ter, you can skip this para­graph and scroll right on down to the tweets! For those who may be un­fa­mil­iar, Twit­ter is a so­cial net­work­ing site that al­lows users to post and read short 140-char­ac­ter mes­sages (tweets). With such a short length limit these tweets suc­cinctly con­vey a bit of news, a ran­dom thought, or a state of emo­tion at a par­tic­u­lar mo­ment in time. A hash­tag (#) be­fore a word or phase al­lows users to group and eas­ily find posts of re­lated topic or theme, and can of­ten take a form of lit­er­ary irony, or sim­ple sar­casm. The @ sign is put be­fore a user­name (han­dle) to iden­tify and 'tag' that user's ac­count so they get no­ti­fied the post is there. In ad­di­tion to an of­fi­cial Twit­ter han­dle, users have a reg­u­lar dis­play name. Many thus choose to use their real name for the dis­play, and some­thing else for their han­dle (e.g. Robert Koch@PostulatePunk).

So now we want your ideas for If Mi­crobes Could Tweet... Our de­part­ment tended to pick mi­crobes that we use in house as model or­gan­isms.  But of course there are many more out there, per­fect for some cre­ative fun. So what would your fa­vorite mi­crobe use as its han­dle, and what would it tweet about its lifestyle and as­so­ciates?

You can use this tem­plate (in­ac­tive link) to cre­ate your own tweets for your microbe(s) of choice. You can then post them be­low in the com­ments. Or if you have your own Twit­ter ac­count, tweet your ideas with at­tri­bu­tion to the mi­crobe and #mi­cro­bialtweets, for ex­am­ple:

S. pombe #mi­cro­bialtweets: Feels like I'm be­ing torn in two... #headache #fis­sion­prob­lems