Lost & Found #3

by Christoph

If you want to leave 𝕏 (for­merly Twit­ter) for any rea­son, you can de­ac­ti­vate or com­pletely delete your ac­count. That's it then. But if you want to take a few still in­ter­est­ing book­marks with you when you move out, well, then the 𝕏o­dus takes a lit­tle longer. Here are three more of these sal­vaged book­marks, in Lost & Found #3.

Book­mark #1

"FtsK is a dou­ble-stranded DNA translo­case, a mo­tor that con­verts the chem­i­cal en­ergy of bind­ing and hy­drolysing ATP into move­ment of a DNA sub­strate. It moves DNA at an amaz­ing rate – >5,000 bp per sec­ond – and is pow­er­ful enough to re­move other pro­teins from the DNA" (ref.). If you want/need to know more about the role of FtsK in chro­mo­some seg­re­ga­tion and cell di­vi­sion in bac­te­ria, please re­fer to Fig­ure 2 and the leg­end in this pa­per (Open Ac­cess) by Mar­tin Thanbich­ler. The tweet by James Wagstaff was based on a preprint and has since been pub­lished.

The tweet is no longer avail­able, you can see the video here (GIF).

Book­mark #2

In 2021, the de­voted "phage hunter" Alexan­der Harms (@aharms485.bsky.social) and his co­workers pub­lished the BASEL phage col­lec­tion. Work on the fol­low-up was al­ready in full swing at the time, and a preprint has just been pub­lished, but it does not in­clude the photo of a typ­i­cal plaque as­say shown here. It must have stayed in the lab jour­nal – and, for­tu­nately, found its way onto 𝕏.

If the tweet is no longer avail­able, you can see a screen cap­ture here, and the im­age here.
 

Book­mark #3

As Jan-Willem Veen­ing (@jwveening.bsky.social) says in his tweet: Cool movie alert! For a mi­cro­scopist, there is hardly any­thing more sat­is­fy­ing than pa­tiently ob­serv­ing how a grow­ing bac­te­r­ial pop­u­la­tion grad­u­ally be­comes het­ero­ge­neous (here "red" and "green"). Un­for­tu­nately, only still pho­tographs can be shown in printed pub­li­cations, and these have, even when arranged as a time­line, con­siderably less charm than a movie. Note that the 16 frames in the movie were ac­tu­ally taken over a pe­riod of 280 min (Fig­ure 5F). This tweet was based on a preprint and has since been pub­lished.

If the tweet is no longer avail­able, you can see a screen cap­ture here, and the video here (GIF).
 

Other Posts

  • Teach to Teach

    by Elio — Typ­i­cal of old folks, my mind read­ily wan­ders back to events in ear­lier days. High on the list of mem­o­ries that pop up is that of my very first lec­ture. It's one that I gave to med­ical stu­dents, the year be­ing 1962 or 10 years af­ter Wat­son and Crick. Imag­ine the thrill.

  • Im­ages Can Shape Us

    Pic­tures Con­sid­ered #64 by Roberto — It used to be that, when I closed my eyes and thought back, search­ing for a defin­ing mo­ment that sparked my life-long pas­sion for mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­ogy, this im­age came vividly to mind. Most mem­o­ries lie buried, com­ing back only mys­te­ri­ously, and of­ten with­out cue. This one, though, is clear.

  • Into the Deep Blue

    by Christoph — Just let the deep ul­tra­ma­rine blue of the fron­tispiece sink in at your leisure. Take your time. Surely, You will soon re­al­ize that it is not a pho­to­graph of the night sky with the milky way and myr­i­ads of stars, but a de­tail from an oil paint­ing...

  • The Early Days of Re­stric­tion En­zymes

    by John Collins — In the early 1960s, Werner Ar­ber in Switzer­land dis­cov­ered that for­eign DNA en­ter­ing a bac­te­r­ial cell could be cleaved on both strands by re­stric­tion en­donu­cle­ases (re­stric­tion en­zymes). This was part of the host's de­fense against vi­ral at­tack. For this dis­cov­ery he shared the 1978 No­bel Prize with Hamil­ton Smith and Daniel Nathans.