The folks at io9 have some excellent/terrifying news for H.P. Lovecraft fans: Scientists have just discovered (mini) Cthulhu, in the form of two octopus like protists that live in the stomachs of wood-digesting protists. Meet Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque.

They seem to be hot on the beat of Cthulhu-ology these days, what with the discovery of this particularly Lovecraftian fossil and all.

I, for one, welcome our tentacled overlords.

Source: io9.com

Mainly Microbe - Meet Your Microbiome!!

New episode time! Wooooo!! Party!!

This week we take a look at one of my favorite subjects in biology. The microbiome. Throughout history, germs and microbes have been associated with the icky, the bad and the unhealthy. But it turns out we are walking ecosystems, chock full of tiny microbial mates!

Think about it: Ever not felt completely like yourself? There’s a good reason for that. Because a large part of you … isn’t you. Our bodies are home to ten times as many microbes as human cells. We are walking ecosystems, each of us home to thousands of different species on and inside of us.

Sure, some bacteria are dangerous, but without our tiny friends we wouldn’t be here. Literally. Like, they keep us alive.

This episode just scratches the surface of all the awesome microbiome science that’s out there. What do you want to know more about? Leave me a comment over at YouTube or send me a message and we can keep this microbiome party going.

Also, I am particularly proud of my t-shirt in this one.

Enjoy, share with your friends and subscribe to IOTBS on YouTube for more great science.

Insect wings can shred bacteria to pieces! This video shows how a newly discovered nanostructure on the wings of cicadas can rip certain bacterial membranes to shreds. This structure, perfected by nature as a natural defense against dangerous microbes, could be harnessed by humans to create antimicrobial surfaces.

Sometimes nature is our best innovator.

(More at Nature News)

Source: nature.com

Bacteria Found Deep Under Antarctic Ice After drilling into Lake Whillans, a dark, isolated lake that lies under a half-mile of Antarctic ice, scientists have found bacteria living happily there. Everywhere on Earth that we look for life, from basking in rainbow-colored mineral ponds to laying dormant for 86 million years in seabed clay, we find life. If it can happen in all of these Earthly environments, just imagine what non-Earthly environments may hold. Science is so exciting. Let’s keep looking. (more on these cool bugs at the NY Times)
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Bacteria Found Deep Under Antarctic Ice

After drilling into Lake Whillans, a dark, isolated lake that lies under a half-mile of Antarctic ice, scientists have found bacteria living happily there.

Everywhere on Earth that we look for life, from basking in rainbow-colored mineral ponds to laying dormant for 86 million years in seabed clay, we find life.

If it can happen in all of these Earthly environments, just imagine what non-Earthly environments may hold. Science is so exciting. Let’s keep looking.

(more on these cool bugs at the NY Times)

Source: The New York Times

It’s been a big week for poop science …

Thankfully, most of us don’t go through our day puckered in fear that we might, at any unknown moment, loose our bowels in a Niagara-esque outpouring of one’s colon contents. But for people with Clostridium dificile infections, that is a clear and present danger.

It’s not just the discomfort of frequent and recurring diarrhea that plagues those with C. diff. They are at real risk of damaging their colon tissue from inflammation as well as serious dehydration. Even worse, C. diff. is hard to kill with antibiotics, as it most often rears its anaerobic head when a patient has had their normal gut flora killed off by previous antibiotic treatment, leaving the colon a lawless Wild West for the tiny diarrhea bandits to take over.

There is good news, though (see below)! The Wyatt Earp in this (south)-Western is being played by fecal transplants.

Yep. In a fecal transplant, C. diff colons are seeded with donated (purified) fecal material, and all the healthy bacteria therein, and they fight off the bad guys. Not a very intriguing opportunity, eh? Well, if you’ve ever had a C. diff. infection, I hear you’d change your mind pretty fast.

The news:

  1. A clinical trial in Europe for fecal transplants was halted early … because it worked so well! People in the placebo group were like “Hey, that guy’s getting better really fast. Damn! I’m in the placebo group! Hey doc, give me some of that gravy!”
  2. A separate team of scientists has developed a “pseudo-poo” to take the “poo donors” out of the equation. By infusing a solution full of the 33 most helpful gut bacteria, two women were cured of their C. diff infections!

These scientists must be swollen full of pride, about ready to gush thanks to this outpouring of amazing results! 

But seriously, fighting bad poo with good poo? Nature, you work in mysterious ways. I like that. Keeps it interesting.

Best Microscope Videos of 2012 as chosen by Nikon’s Small World Life is not static. It’s a series of ons and offs, back and forths, ins and outs, heres and theres, growth and death. Sure, we can learn a great deal from static study on scales beyond the macro (just ask Robert Hooke), but when you witness the dynamic nature of the finer scales of life … man, that’s where it’s at. Winners via science-junkie: *1st Place: Sensing Danger*Olena Kamenyeva, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.Subject: Recruitment of neutrophils to the site of laser damage in mouse inguinal lymph node. *2nd Place: Sperm From Two Males Competing*Stefan Lüpold, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.Subject: Sperm from two males competing within reproductive tract of a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Magnification: 400x. *3rd Place: Growing Complexity in the Kidney*Nils Lindstrom, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.Subject: Complexity of ureteric bud branching and nephron formation. *Honorable Mention: The Rotifer Limnias melicerta*Fengzhu Xiong, Micropolitan Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands.Subject: Limnias melicerta (a rotifer). Magnification: 400x. (More about these amazing captures at Wired.com)
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Best Microscope Videos of 2012 as chosen by Nikon’s Small World Life is not static. It’s a series of ons and offs, back and forths, ins and outs, heres and theres, growth and death. Sure, we can learn a great deal from static study on scales beyond the macro (just ask Robert Hooke), but when you witness the dynamic nature of the finer scales of life … man, that’s where it’s at. Winners via science-junkie: *1st Place: Sensing Danger*Olena Kamenyeva, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.Subject: Recruitment of neutrophils to the site of laser damage in mouse inguinal lymph node. *2nd Place: Sperm From Two Males Competing*Stefan Lüpold, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.Subject: Sperm from two males competing within reproductive tract of a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Magnification: 400x. *3rd Place: Growing Complexity in the Kidney*Nils Lindstrom, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.Subject: Complexity of ureteric bud branching and nephron formation. *Honorable Mention: The Rotifer Limnias melicerta*Fengzhu Xiong, Micropolitan Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands.Subject: Limnias melicerta (a rotifer). Magnification: 400x. (More about these amazing captures at Wired.com)
Zoom Info
Best Microscope Videos of 2012 as chosen by Nikon’s Small World Life is not static. It’s a series of ons and offs, back and forths, ins and outs, heres and theres, growth and death. Sure, we can learn a great deal from static study on scales beyond the macro (just ask Robert Hooke), but when you witness the dynamic nature of the finer scales of life … man, that’s where it’s at. Winners via science-junkie: *1st Place: Sensing Danger*Olena Kamenyeva, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.Subject: Recruitment of neutrophils to the site of laser damage in mouse inguinal lymph node. *2nd Place: Sperm From Two Males Competing*Stefan Lüpold, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.Subject: Sperm from two males competing within reproductive tract of a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Magnification: 400x. *3rd Place: Growing Complexity in the Kidney*Nils Lindstrom, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.Subject: Complexity of ureteric bud branching and nephron formation. *Honorable Mention: The Rotifer Limnias melicerta*Fengzhu Xiong, Micropolitan Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands.Subject: Limnias melicerta (a rotifer). Magnification: 400x. (More about these amazing captures at Wired.com)
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Best Microscope Videos of 2012 as chosen by Nikon’s Small World Life is not static. It’s a series of ons and offs, back and forths, ins and outs, heres and theres, growth and death. Sure, we can learn a great deal from static study on scales beyond the macro (just ask Robert Hooke), but when you witness the dynamic nature of the finer scales of life … man, that’s where it’s at. Winners via science-junkie: *1st Place: Sensing Danger*Olena Kamenyeva, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.Subject: Recruitment of neutrophils to the site of laser damage in mouse inguinal lymph node. *2nd Place: Sperm From Two Males Competing*Stefan Lüpold, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.Subject: Sperm from two males competing within reproductive tract of a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Magnification: 400x. *3rd Place: Growing Complexity in the Kidney*Nils Lindstrom, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.Subject: Complexity of ureteric bud branching and nephron formation. *Honorable Mention: The Rotifer Limnias melicerta*Fengzhu Xiong, Micropolitan Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands.Subject: Limnias melicerta (a rotifer). Magnification: 400x. (More about these amazing captures at Wired.com)
Zoom Info

Best Microscope Videos of 2012 as chosen by Nikon’s Small World

Life is not static. It’s a series of ons and offs, back and forths, ins and outs, heres and theres, growth and death. Sure, we can learn a great deal from static study on scales beyond the macro (just ask Robert Hooke), but when you witness the dynamic nature of the finer scales of life … man, that’s where it’s at.

Winners via science-junkie:

*1st Place: Sensing Danger*
Olena Kamenyeva, National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
Subject: Recruitment of neutrophils to the site of laser damage in mouse inguinal lymph node.

*2nd Place: Sperm From Two Males Competing*
Stefan Lüpold, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.
Subject: Sperm from two males competing within reproductive tract of a female fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Magnification: 400x.

*3rd Place: Growing Complexity in the Kidney*
Nils Lindstrom, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Subject: Complexity of ureteric bud branching and nephron formation.

*Honorable Mention: The Rotifer Limnias melicerta*
Fengzhu Xiong, Micropolitan Museum Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Subject: Limnias melicerta (a rotifer). Magnification: 400x.


(More about these amazing captures at Wired.com)

Coming of Phage

Everything you’ve been taught about phage is wrong. Well, maybe not everything. Heck, maybe you’ve never been taught anything about phage in the first place! But if you’ve ever encountered a story about this family of bacteria-infecting viruses, I’m willing to bet it included a picture much like this:

image

That geometric lunar lander is the standard illustration of phage such as T7. It looks exotic and alien, a freakish example of biological symmetry, but it’s pretty true to the actual biology: The icosahedral protein head, the protruding neck that it uses to pierce the membrane of its victim so that it can inject its genetic material … and the legs.

Wait a sec, those legs need revising. Some really cool new research by Ian Molineux (who taught my graduate school molecular bio class, btw) says that all those “legs-out”, moon lander drawings of phage probably aren’t right.

In the video above you see that, according to the electron imagery they report in their Science paper, those legs stay tucked up next to the body for most of the free-floating life of the phage. It sort of drags one or two along, waiting to hook onto an appropriate bacterium that it can infect, at which point it extends the rest of the legs to go into full infection mode. To give you an idea of how hard this was to observe, a single phage is only around 20-30 nanometers wide, which means you could fit about 4,000 of them across the width of a single human hair!

It might seem like a small, ho-hum tidbit of research at first, since who really cares about a virus that infects bacteria? But phage are incredibly important. Phage have driven a great deal of the evolution of life on Earth. They are vehicles of gene swapping that have allowed genomes to expand and become more complex. They are veterans of 70+ years of biology research, from back when we first identified DNA as a genetic material to today’s exotic synthetic biology applications. A great deal of what we know about molecular genetics is because of these little guys, and we’re still making the most basic discoveries as to how they function.

Never let anyone tell you that there’s nothing left to discover! We have scarcely begun to fill in the colors, even for the most basic parts of biology’s palette. 

The Evolution of Cavities How our ancestors development of farming led to a population explosion of a certain bacterium in our mouths, evolving in the human mouth to break down plant sugars and grains by stealing genes from other bacteria in our bodies, and how that gave us cavities.  (via Phenomena: The Loom)
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The Evolution of Cavities

How our ancestors development of farming led to a population explosion of a certain bacterium in our mouths, evolving in the human mouth to break down plant sugars and grains by stealing genes from other bacteria in our bodies, and how that gave us cavities. 

(via Phenomena: The Loom)

Source: National Geographic

Wee (Me) Beasties This is inside you, right now. You’re looking at a (false-colored, unfortunately) electron microscope image of a colonucopia of gut bacteria. From the common species like E. coli to the still-to-be-discovered, your biology depends a lot on what you’re made of that isn’t exactly you.  In addition to, you know, digesting your food, these little guys can turn your immune system against you and even influence your mood. If you want to dig deeper inside your intestinal tract, there’s a fantastic Radiolab episode called “Guts” you should check out. Check out more amazing images of the unseen microbial world as as tiny art at National Geographic’s Microbes: Small, Small World gallery. (tip of the electron microscope probe to Science-Based Life)
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Wee (Me) Beasties

This is inside you, right now. You’re looking at a (false-colored, unfortunately) electron microscope image of a colonucopia of gut bacteria. From the common species like E. coli to the still-to-be-discovered, your biology depends a lot on what you’re made of that isn’t exactly you. 

In addition to, you know, digesting your food, these little guys can turn your immune system against you and even influence your mood. If you want to dig deeper inside your intestinal tract, there’s a fantastic Radiolab episode called “Guts” you should check out.

Check out more amazing images of the unseen microbial world as as tiny art at National Geographic’s Microbes: Small, Small World gallery.

(tip of the electron microscope probe to Science-Based Life)

Source: National Geographic