by Roberto — With kind permission by the organizers, we reproduce here an edited transcript of Roberto's talk (via live video) at the meeting on 'Major ideas in quantitative microbial physiology: Past, Present and Future', held in June this year in København, Denmark.
by Roberto — What with the all the talk about CRISPR, the renewed interest in phage therapy, the widespread occurrence of huge phages (to mention but a few of the reasons phage are constantly in the news these days), it's no exaggeration to say that once again in biology "phage are all the rage"...
by Sean Kearney — How frequently do microbes exchange genes when living on a host? This question has been on my mind lately. Broadly speaking, the discovery of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) revolutionized the way we think about prokaryotic evolution. No more could we think only of inheritance via vertical descent — HGT made possible the transmission of traits even between distantly related species.
by Merry Youle — Bacteria have been sexually promiscuous, swapping genes with gusto, for a very long time. More than 15% of E. coli's genome has arrived via horizontal gene transfer (HGT), with some 200 installments having turned up since it diverged from Salmonella 100 million years ago. And, as you are probably thinking, those 200 are...
