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 An end to the blogging hiatus at last! I hope to entertain you with the fascinating story on how female wasps got rid of their men and sex in return for bacterial endosymbionts.. Despite the obvious benefits of pleasure and procreation, sex has other advantages. The genetic material of both parents gets mixed in new [...]  In my high school text books, bacteria were primarily defined in terms of what they were not. “Bacteria don’t have a nucleus”, “bacteria don’t have mitochondria”, “bacteria are not capable of complex membrane trafficking” and so on. But such boundaries seem to blur as more and more “eukaryote specific” properties pop up in some corners [...]  Last week’s blog post on the ancestry of the malarial plasmid attracted several insightful comments by Psi Wavefunction. One of the issues discussed was when exactly the malarial ancestor changed his lifestyle from being a coral symbiont to a coral parasite. This week I came across a paper in PNAS that shows that corals themselves [...]  I’m happy and proud to tell you that Lab Rat was kind enough to write today’s blogpost. She brings you a fascinating story about little magnetic particles found in some bacteria, that may help them find their way like compasses do. Normally she writes great posts on bacteria on her own blog, which recently moved [...]  Suppose you’re nearing the end of your life. In a strange twist of fate, you won the lottery. You decide to split the jackpot equally between your two children. While one child uses the money to fund a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, the other one uses it to start the crime syndicate he has [...] Last week, the world learned of the first living organism that carries a synthetic genome. That that same genome contains the nucleic equivalents of both graffiti and poetry is less known… Unless you’ve been avoiding science news for over a week, you’ve been bombarded by news of the creation of the first ‘synthetic cell’ by [...] |
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