• Long Dis­tance Chats

    by Eam­mon Ri­ley and Alex Meeske — Writ­ing this blog en­try with a fel­low grad­u­ate stu­dent nearly 3000 miles away taught us both a valu­able les­son in com­mu­ni­ca­tion: it is sim­ply chal­leng­ing to com­mu­ni­cate ef­fec­tively across great dis­tances. Not so with mi­crobes. Re­cently sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that bac­te­ria can over­come the prob­lems of long-range com­mu­ni­ca­tion. With the...

  • There's Gold in That Periplasm

    by Elio — When think­ing of a gold prospec­tor, most of us con­jure up a wiz­ened old char­ac­ter lead­ing a mule that car­ries his pick, gold pan, and rusty cof­fee pot. Nowa­days, think of bac­te­ria in­stead. Specif­i­cally, pic­ture the bac­terium Cupri­avidus met­al­lidu­rans (for­merly Ral­sto­nia met­al­lidu­rans), which car­ries out...