by Christoph — Like with the customary New Year's Eve fireworks, every year we biologists are blessed with hitherto unknown or largely uncommon scientific terms. Some stick, others blaze away like said fireworks. How would you guess the term "virovory," which was added to Wikipedia on 29 December 2022, will fare?
Pictures Considered #38 by Christoph — Imagine you equip your standard E. coli cells with a few additional genes, conveniently placed on plasmids and under control of inducible promoters. You grow the cells and induce the expression of these additional genes. Not long after, the cytoplasm of the cells turns reddish, when looked at under the fluorescence microscope, due to...
by Elio — Extrusomes are nasty membrane-bound structures released by ciliates and flagellates. They come in a number of varieties, the best studied being the trichocysts of paramecia. These can be discharged by the thousands per cell in response to physical stimuli, including when attacked by predators. Instead of being used...
by Radwa Raed Sharaf — What could those three possibly have in common? Believe it or not, they all play the role of a lead action figure in kids' video games. Hearing the latest edition of the German biotechnology news broadcast, I was surprised to learn that researchers of the Riedel-Kruse lab at Stanford...
by Merry — From the bacterial point of view, a paramecium is a microcosm offering several tempting niches for colonization. When you collect a paramecium from nature, it's likely to have hundreds – even thousands – of bacterial endosymbionts on board, in different locations. Some will likely be in the...
by Merry Youle — Organisms such as ciliates that dine daily on bacteria run the risk of getting an infection. Indeed, ciliates, large complex cells , are host in nature to gazillion different bacteria that they acquire primarily through phagocytosis at their "mouth." Resident bacteria are generally termed symbionts even though...
