by Christoph
Michael Arnold, a geneticist at UGA, Athens, GA was cited in an article in the New York Times, saying: "It's sort of cool that evolution is really messy." Is that so? Or is it the stinted capability of our brains to tackle complex problems – not so terribly cool, after all – that let's us perceive evolution as messy?
Suppose you wanted to find a place in nature where there are bacteria but no extracellular phages. Where would you look?
Which infection has the most levels of parasitism?
With the buzz created by the discovery of giant viruses, e.g., Mimivirus, the distinction between viruses and cells is said to get blurred. I maintain that this is not the case because the single most important distinction is that viruses lose...
by Merry Youle — The bacterial endosymbionts of insects are a perpetual source of wonderment. We wonder, for example, what is driving the paring down of the genomes in the intracellular world? How far can it go? Is the pattern of gene loss similar from one endosymbiont to the next? Are they on the…
by Ramy Aziz — Is there anything microbes cannot do?
Suppose a marine bacterium evolved the perfect phage defense, one that no phage could overcome. A thousand years hence, what changes would you expect to see in the marine microbial community?
