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Entries in the ' bacteria ' category
Congratulations to ScienceDaily for this, um, baffling introduction:
“Cornell researchers are studying bacterium big enough to see — the Shaquille O’Neal of bacteria. Well, perhaps not quite Shaquille O’Neal. But it is Shaq-teria.“
Uh. ok. Anyway, they’re reporting on this paper: “Extreme polyploidy in a large bacterium“, which does sound interesting, and really didn’t deserve that pun. [...]
Andrew Pollack in the NYTimes reveals the secret message implanted in the recently announced synthetic bacterial genome.
You were expecting poetry perhaps? The secret messages hidden in scientist J. Craig Venter’s synthetic bacterial genome have now been revealed. They are — his name, and that of his research institute and co-workers.
I can’t decide whether this is [...]
Written January 7, 2008 in anthropology, bacteria, it-was-better-in-my-day, people, quotes, science
The journal Nature has digitised their entire publication archive - dating all the way back to November 4th, 1869. Nature has been one of the most influential journals in science (the wikipedia has a good history), so this is a good chance to poke around their archives. Unfortunately, all the good stuff is still behind [...]
Bacteria with greatly elevated mutation rates (mutators) are frequently found in natural and laborator populations, and are often associated with clinical infections. Although mutators may increase adaptability to novel environmental conditions, they are also prone to the accumulation of deleterious mutations. The long-term maintenance of high bacterial mutation rates is therefore likely to be driven [...]
Written November 16, 2007 in bacteria, evolution, genetics, horizontal gene transfer, phylogenetics
This sounds most interesting -
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is recognized as the major force for bacterial genome evolution. Yet, numerous questions remain about the transferred genes, their function, quantity and frequency. The extent to which genetic transformation by exogenous DNA has occurred over evolutionary time was initially addressed by an in silico approach using the [...]
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