by Roberto — Towards the end of last century, I read a short but provocative note entitled "Do bacteria sing?" With a title like that, who's not going to read it? As is usually the case, that reading led to more reading. I discovered several papers describing how some bacteria could be stimulated to form colonies more efficiently following sound stimulation.
by Anna Dragoš — Bacteria live in microbial jungles where they constantly must cope with siblings exploiting their food, predators trying to eat them, or hostile strains shooting at them with antibacterial weapons. Through billions of years of evolution...
by Elio — From bacteria on up, all the way to the cells of our bodies, most cells divide by binary fission. That is, the process initiates at midcell, usually by constriction, and proceeds until the two resultant daughter cells become separated. Most often, these two sister cells are identical in size and shape. Boring. Enter Bacillus subtilis...
by Elio — The very first entry in this blog, in December 2006, was about the amazing fact that some photosynthetic cyanobacteria have a circadian rhythm. I entitled it "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing."
by Roberto — This photograph, taken from our book Life at the Edge of Sight, shows a network of almost invisible fungal filaments which, like miniature highways, wind their way around peaks and form bridges over valleys all within a minute amount of soil.
by Christoph — Streptomycetes, these non-motile Actinobacteria that are capable of mycelial growth much like fungi, are quite inventive when it comes to the distribution of their spores. They don't just rely on enchanting scents like geosmin that they emit to attract springtails, which transport their spores over long distances (see Roberto's recent post). They also routinely employ bacterial transport workers.
