A Spe­cial Is­sue

by Elio

I have long en­joyed the jour­nal Na­ture Mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, but the Au­gust 2016 is­sue sur­passes what I have read be­fore. Prac­ti­cally every en­try is it stand­out. I will men­tion only a few but en­cour­age all to have a look.

Sev­eral con­sor­tia of au­thors present the 2016 Mi­cro­bial Olympics, re­port­ing on such typ­i­cally mi­cro­bi­al events as the Marathon, Ca­noe slalom, (Bio­geo­chem­i­cal) cy­cling, Syn­chro­nized Swarm­ing, Fenc­ing, Eques­trian, Triathlon, Long jump, and the Clos­ing cer­e­mony. Saves you a trip to Rio.

Sel­dom have I been so thor­oughly se­duced by a book re­view that I can't wait to read the book. Sil­via Bulgheresi's cri­tique of Ed Yong's new I Con­tain Mul­ti­tudes ac­com­plishes just that. I don't re­mem­ber read­ing a more ex­cit­ing or bet­ter writ­ten re­view. The book bet­ter live up to it. A re­veal­ing in­ter­view with Yong by An­drew Jermy ac­com­pa­nies it.

Time-lapse imag­ing of »coli-flower« for­ma­tion by a strain com­pletely lack­ing FtsZ. Source

Magic hap­pens, as in strains of E. coli (con­structed by Mer­cier, Kawai, and Erring­ton) that lack the nearly omni­present and rous­ing di­vi­sion pro­tein FtsZ. What do they look like? Well, like »coli-flow­ers«. That is, they make branched syn­cy­tial mul­ti­cel­lu­lar ag­gre­gates that look like noth­ing you've ever seen. Don't miss the videos, es­pe­cial­ly No. 8. A com­men­tary by Piet de Boer neatly places this find­ing in the con­text of other mor­pho­log­i­cal va­ri­eties ex­hib­ited by E. coli cells.

A let­ter by U. Kutschera goes over Haeckel's 1866 tree of life, where bac­te­ria, then called Mon­era, find them­selves on a new king­dom, al­beit as "most sim­ple or­gan­isms, with­out struc­ture, ho­mo­ge­neous pieces of plasma." They were called Bac­te­ria for the first time in 1872, thanks to Fer­di­nand Cohn. The Ar­chaea had to wait for Woese.

"Every­thing is every­where but the en­vi­ron­ment se­lects," a fa­mous dic­tum by Baas Beck­ing (some­times mis­at­trib­uted to M. Bei­jer­inck) is ex­am­ined in the light of the cur­rent glut of mi­cro­bio­mes. Does it hold up? Well, sort of, as ac­cord­ing to a study by Gonnella et al. of the mi­crobes in ma­rine hy­drother­mal vents. Pe­ter Gir­guis writes a fine com­men­tary.

Is more of multi-omics what's needed? Vi­lanova and Por­car posit that cul­ti­va­tion tech­niques are as im­por­tant as ever, if not more so. They say: "As an ex­am­ple of 'trees hid­den by the for­est', bio­lo­gi­cal in­ter­ac­tions among mem­bers of a mi­cro­bial com­mu­nity of­ten re­main buried be­neath the mas­sive multi-omic datasets."  Omics, they sug­gest, add com­plex­ity. They fur­ther pro­pose that, "In plain words, the chal­lenge is to re­duce com­plex­ity to im­prove un­der­stand­ing."

...and when you want to see the movie from which the time-lapse above was as­sem­bled, here it is: