Best we know, endospore formation in bacteria is limited to the phylum Firmicutes. Why haven't others evolved to use this wonderful survival device? How would you teach a non-spore forming bacterium to make spores?
What's your guess as to the number of different kinds of viruses that can infect a single species on average?
by Roberto — When it comes to the animals that humans raise to eat, a quick look at their numbers proves sobering. Worldwide, there are some 650 million pigs, 1 billion heads of cattle and 26 billion chickens. Such numbers canot be achieved by traditional animal rearing practices that use extensive surface areas. Rather, most of these animals are grown...
by Elio — All bacteria, even those that are spherical, display geometric asymmetries during at least part of their life cycle, and it appears that cells take advantage of these asymmetries to localize cellular components to specific sites. So begins a paper by Li and Young that describes a novel approach for…
Can you conceive of a virus that can divide by binary fission?
Pictures Considered #2 by Elio — We continue our series of images that have made a difference in microbiology. This one, published by John Cairns in 1963 has earned a most deserved place in textbooks and reviews. It shows a radioautograph of an intact E. coli chromosome in the act of replicating. From this image…
by Mizuho Ota — I wonder if you are familiar with this icon. It depicts the "eyedropper," a commonly used tool in computer graphics and painting programs that allows you to choose any spot on an image and identify its exact color. On a computer this is easy information to obtain; however, in dealing with real materials, the question "but what exactly IS it?"…
