Microbiology

Slimeball… a derogative term to be sure, from the modern usage, but before it was ever dragged down to the world of insults and verbal nastiness we know it for today, the scum of which we speak and the small bacteria that form them were simply the catalysts for the many beautiful colours we see in hot springs.

Cooperation is seen in every corner of life from microbes to humans, many times with no obvious advantages to those that provide it at high costs. Given the existence of “freeloading cheaters” ready to exploit the resources of those cooperating, why is it that cooperation persist? In an article now published in the journal Current Biology Nogueira and colleagues suggest that in bacteria this can result from highly mobile genes that “jump” from one cell to the next carrying the cooperative traits, effectively turning everyone into a cooperator. They also show that, at least in Escherichia coli (E. coli), this new population remains stable through “punisher” genes that impose a mafia-like strategy of “cooperation or death”, ensuring that the new cooperators do not revert to freeloading.

Researchers say they have discovered how to transform human embryonic stem cells into germ cells, the embryonic cells that ultimately give rise to sperm and eggs, an advance that will allow researchers to observe previously inaccessible human germ cells in laboratory dishes.

"This achievement opens a new window into what was only recently a hidden stage of human development," said Susan B. Shurin, M.D., acting director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Institute that provided funding for the study. "Laboratory observation of human germ cells has the potential to yield important clues to the origins of unexplained infertility and to the genesis of many birth defects and chromosomal disorders."

Your Jack-o'-Lantern may scare away more than just birds - the skin of that pumpkin contains a substance that could put a scare into microbes that cause millions of cases of yeast infections in adults and infants each year, says a new study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Kyung-Soo Hahm, Yoonkyung Park and colleagues note that some disease-causing microbes are becoming resistant to existing antibiotics so scientists worldwide are searching for new antibiotics. Past studies had hinted that pumpkin, long used as folk medicine in some countries, might have antibiotic effects.

For those who enjoyed our first set of bacteria art images, you will definitely want to check out Microbial Art.

www.microbialart.com

For those who enjoyed our first set of bacteria art images, you will definitely want to check out Microbial Art.

www.microbialart.com

Parts of our genetic programs that determine programmed cell death in plants and animals are actually evolutionarily related and function in a similar way, according to an article in Nature Cell Biology.

Research has previously believed that animals and plants developed different genetic programs for cell death. 

Seen on a culture plate of a member of my lab that is not me (i.e., ain't supposed to be there).  I see a turkey, but maybe I'm just hungry.

One of the professors at my marine station retired, and is in the process of clearing out his lab. This has resulted in a sudden windfall of free stuff, some awesome (an invertebrate textbook so old it lists the phylum Vermes) and some completely useless (ancient test tubes of unknown contamination history).

The most awesome to date was a box of squid, fixed and embedded in plastic over ten years ago. These squid provided the data for the study which proved horizonal transmission of the symbiotic bacteria in the accessory nidamental gland.

I know, right? Isn't that amazing?