Microbiology

DNA computing and storage has been on the horizon for most of this decade but never gone beyond the intellectual exercise stage.   Storage limitations were far too small to merit applied science efforts so it was clever but that was the extent of it. That may not be the situation for much longer.   GenomeWeb reports that a research team from the Chinese University of Hong Kong has encrypted and stored a hefty 90GB of data in one gram of bacteria, creating what they are calling a "massively parallel bacterial storage system." And, in case you are worried about someone hacking your…

It was hard to miss the arsenic microbe news last week.  Heck, I was in the woods of Pennsylvania with no cell phone access much less Internet and I knew about it.    The NASA hype machine and mass media's need to sell eyeballs made sure of that. But for those of us immune to the hype, there was good stuff in there.   And during the sifting of the good science from the hysteria about alien life, you may have been wondering, as did I, why the name GFAJ-1?  It turns out that it isn't some elaborate acronym for a long science term.   Paul Davies in The Wall Street…

Bacteria that we carry in our bodies may help decide who we marry, according to a new study that analyzes the gut of...a small fruit fly.  A group of molecular biologists recently demonstrated that the symbiotic bacteria inside a fruit fly greatly influence its choice of mates.  They propose that the basic unit of natural selection is not the individual living organism, plant or animal, but rather a larger biological milieu called a holobiont. This milieu can include plant or animal life as well as their symbiotic partners. In the case of animals, these partners tend to be…

On Thanksgiving Day, it will be all hugs and football for many people, but inside their mouths one of the biggest wars of the year will be taking place. Streptococcus mutans and other harmful bacteria get their own holiday feast and S. mutans gets to launch one of its biggest assaults of the year on your tooth enamel.  But you have soldiers on your side too, namely cranberries and even wine, say dental researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center Cookies, pies and other sweets common on Thanksgiving contain mountains of sugar, but it's not the sugar itself that causes tooth…

Many bacteria spend much of their existence within a matrix that they create, called biofilm. Biofilm consists of mucopolysaccharide (or slime-like, think “The Blob” from the 1950s) structures produced by microorganisms as a defense mechanism against their environment.  Encased in biofilm, bacteria can survive for prolonged periods by assuming a dormant state. When bacteria are in a dormant state, they are largely immune to antibiotics, which are generally only effective against bacteria during specific non-dormant stages in their life cycle. Biofilm infections are associated with sinus…

Me, you and we... thats what the bacteria talk! Even more, like different people and races have different languages, different bacteria use different chemical 'words'. Broadly classifying, the gram negative bacteria use small molecules like acyl homocerine lactones (AHLs) and the gram positive bacteria use peptides. Initially it was believed that these words are species specific but later research revealed that there are infact more viz., intra species, inter species and also the ones which are commonly spoken by most of all bacteria. I would love to decode their language as the following;…

Oil fields are highly specific ecosystems - they contain no oxygen and the temperature, pressure and salinity are often high, which makes them home to a very particular community of bacteria. Geert van der Kraan, a doctoral student who received his Ph.D. from TU Delft on the subject, says using bacterial changes as a biomonitoring tool in oil fields can be a way of keeping tabs on the state of the oil field itself - and increase its yield. As oil recovery occurs, so do numerous changes in its ecosystem.   For example, in order to extract more oil from a field, methods such as pumping…

Quick, what's the world's favorite beverage? If you said 'beer', you're wrong, water and tea are way ahead, but it means the most comprehensive deciphering of the beer's proteome (the set of proteins that make beer "beer") ever reported will interest you just the same.   Their report on the beer proteome could give brewers a new way to engineer and even customize the flavor and aroma of beer by experimenting with the proteinaceous components. Beer is the world's favorite alcoholic beverage, so you needn't feel bad about your beverage answer.  Pier Giorgio Righetti and colleagues say…

Tuberculosis (TB)  is a contagious disease of the lungs and other organs caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or M. tuberculosis) and which infects roughly a third of the world's population.  5-10% of those in the infected population become sick or infectious at some point during their lifetime.  The mycobacteria survive, and even thrive, inside host macrophages, cells that are part of the human immune system that engulf and destroy bacteria in phagosomes. M. tuberculosis is  engulfed by phagosomes but it blocks phagosome maturation and survives. Figuring out how could…

One thing I see a lot of, given the kind of community we are and so the kinds of people I read to see what's happening in the rest of the world, is how things have to change.  I wrote a piece earlier on Open science and the march of history where I discuss the efforts of companies like Mendeley to shift the thinking of researchers toward open access and open science. But do they really have to change?   If an overwhelming majority of researchers like the system as it exists why would a small group insist on change?   As I have said too many times to count, the reason I never…