...Are Varied In Shape and Function
by Elio — Some thirty years ago it was my good fortune to sit in an airplane next to the famed marine microbiologist, the late Holger Jannasch, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He shared with me stories of his deep-sea explorations, especially his voyages in the submersible Alvin. These included visits to the recently discovered deep sea hydrothermal vents...
by Janie — This New Year story begins with newly hatched baby bobtail squids. Each squid is translucent and barely the size of a grain of barley. As they swim around, the six pores on their heads ringed with mucus-coated cells snag passerby Vibrio fischeri from the water.
by Janie — From a microbial perspective, insect metamorphosis is a treacherous business. The transformation from little earthbound crawler to lapis-blue flier is a flashy eye-catcher, but the change is more than skin-deep. Deep within the larva, the contents of the gut are emptied, intestinal cells wither away by autophagy and apoptosis, and the cavity is re-upholstered with dividing stem cells...
by Elio — How many symbioses that involve three partners can you think of? Surely, not many. But here is one, involving a pathogenic fungus, a bacterium, and a fungal virus.
by Christoph — When searching the metagenomes obtained from single Trichoplax H2 individuals for 16S and 18S rRNA-specific sequences, Gruber-Vodicka et al. found, next to the prevalent Trichoplax and Grellia sequences a third sequence at high frequency that matched well with known 16S rRNA sequences from the Marinamargulisbacteria (ZB3), a branch within the phylum Margulisbacteria...
by Christoph — Take a few thousand small eukaryotic cells, allow for a few different cell types, and season the cells generously with endosymbionts (no, not mitochondria, they already have these!). Let the cells self-organize into a patty – or a potato chip, if you're more into a vegan lifestyle – with a diameter of approximately 0.5–1.0 mm, and a mere 25 µm thick.
