White blood cells have long reigned as the heroes of the immune system. When an infection strikes, the cells, produced in bone marrow, race through the blood to fight off the pathogen. But new research is emerging that individual organs can also play a role in immune system defense, essentially being their own hero. In a study examining a rare and deadly brain infection, scientists at The Rockefeller University have found that the brain cells of healthy people likely produce their own immune system molecules, demonstrating an “intrinsic immunity” that is crucial for stopping an infection.
(via Brain displays an intrinsic mechanism for fighting infection | Newswire)
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…frost flowers, a strange phenomenon where frost grows from imperfections in the surface ice amid extreme sub-zero temperatures…forming spiky structures that have been found to house microorganisms. In fact, the bacteria found in the frost flowers is much more dense than in the frozen water below it, meaning each flower is essentially a temporary ecosystem, not unlike a coral reef…
more.
Feeding Cells
Lauren studies biochemistry, microbiology and molecular biology in an isolation chamber––isolating protein from the nucleus of a safe E.Coli cell.Why?
To understand how specific proteins convert from light energy to chemical energy, becoming food for a cellWhere?
Penn State, University Park campus, Pennsylvania, USA, South Frear BuildingWhat would you like to know about biochemistry, microbiology and molecular biology at Penn State?
Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism. The idea originated with Konstantin Mereschkowsky in his 1926 book Symbiogenesis and the Origin of Species, which proposed that chloroplasts originate from cyanobacteria captured by a protozoan.
Ivan Wallin also supported this concept in his book “Symbionticism and the Origins of Species”. He suggested that bacteria might be the cause of the origin of species, and that species creation may occur through endosymbiosis. Today both chloroplasts and mitochondria are believed, by those who ascribe to the endosymbiotic theory, to have such an origin.
Citizen Science Time: Help Scientists by Sending Them Some Poop.. No Seriously
Stool Samples for Science: For Jack Gilbert’s next research project, he’ll be exploring a dark, mysterious place where thousands of unique species live, many of them unknown to science. He’ll be collecting samples of those species, cataloging them and trying to understand how they live.
Image: Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium species that lives in the human gut. A new project is looking for volunteers to donate stool, skin and mouth samples for a study about the bacteria that live in human intestines. Credit: USDA
He’s not heading out on an expedition to the seafloor, a deep cave or anywhere else to do it, however. The specimens will be coming to him, by mail, in the form of thousands of scrapings from people’s skin, mouths and stools.
“Of course it’s gross, but science and helping people is more important than our sensibilities,” Gilbert, who normally studies marine bacteria at the University of Chicago, told TechNewsDaily.
Want to send Gilbert a bit of you? Simply visit his study’s crowd-funding page and order a $99 kit to participate.
It’s a project whose time has come, says Lita Proctor, who coordinates the Human Mircobiome Project for the National Institutes of Health. She said DNA-analyzing technology — and social media — are finally ready to handle the task, which is being called the American Gut Project.
Ultimately, Gilbert and 28 other U.S. university researchers participating in the American Gut Project hope they can persuade 10,000 people to send scrapings. From those submissions, the researchers hope to learn more about how bacteria, health and diet are related. “How does the Atkins diet affect gut bacteria populations?” and “What bacteria do thinner people tend to have?” are the kinds of questions they should be able to answer, Gilbert said.
As long as they can gather enough volunteers, they plan to publish their first results sometime in 2014, he added.
Winner of Honorable Mention in Olympus’ BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition® of 2010.
Shown here is the polarized light micrograph of a Diatom arachnoidiscus. Diatoms encase themselves in an outer cell wall called a frustule, which is composed of silica, or glass. Although these glass frustules provide diatoms with structure and defense, they are also extremely beautiful.
By Michael Shribak, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA, USA
"Once the diversity of the microbial world is catalogued, it will make astronomy look like a pitiful science."
Julian Davies (via fieldnotesbiologyculture)
Mr. Davies must have not realized how entwined the two studies are, so much so that now we have such a category as ‘Astrobiology’. Which makes me wonder, once the diversity of the microbial world is shown here, what of the microbial world outside of our planet?
Mr. Davies must have not realized how entwined the two studies are, so much so that now we have such a category as ‘Astrobiology’. Which makes me wonder, once the diversity of the microbial world is shown here, what of the microbial world outside of our planet?
Fluorescent micrograph of infected cells (green); the actin cytoskeleton and nuclei of the epithelial cell monolayer are shown in red and blue, respectively. The vaccinia virus disrupted the integrity of this monolayer. Without their cell-to-cell contacts, the infected cells migrate and move around.
By Yoshiki Arakawa and Michael Way, London Research Institute
The Belly Button Biodiversity Project, which explores the bacterial ecosystems living in its participants’ navels, has discovered that a small number of bacterial phylotypes (or “species”) dominate the micro-landscape.
The biologists’ results show a “jungle of microbial diversity” with over 2,300 species of bacteria present and only eight of those recurring frequently — a similar diversity distribution to that of tree species in tropical rainforests.
Psychedelic Bacteria: fluorescent Bacillus subtilis (No photoshop) by Fernan Federici on Flickr.
Pattern formation with fluorescent bacteria (TagBFP, mKate2 and sfGFP).
Pachecovv submitted:
Hi, Just sharing with you a picture i took at my science faculty at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), they put it the day after the sad news about Lynn.
Nice blog by the way
This literally made me cheese right now, thank you so much for the submission! I love that right in the background you see the “Faculty of Sciences” sign incorporated into the shot (very nice!). It’s so great to see others embrace her passing like this even though not much of a mention was given to her here in American media despite her great achievements in science.
On the third day of Christmas my true love bought for me three parasites in petri dishes… You can buy these festive ornaments for your true love at the Artologica Etsy store.
Virologist Ron Fouchier engineered a version of the H5N1 virus that was more contagious between ferrets - a standard ‘animal model’ for how infectious a virus might be between humans.
Diatom Microscopy
The wafer like object featured above is a diatom. It was taken from a water sample in the Gulf of Maine and is seen here edge on, as observed through a microscope — think of viewing a galaxy edgewise in a telescope. A diatom is an aquatic, photosynthetic algae. This one is about 100 microns across; approximately the width of a human hair.
Aquatic plants constitute 10 percent of the Earth’s biomass and may produce as much as 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. Diatoms may also be very significant in the field of nanotechnology; they produce micro-scale valves that may, someday, be components in solar panels on our roofs.
These little creatures appear in the fossil record as far back as the Jurassic Period – more than 144 million years ago.
by John Stetson
3D Printing & Augmented Reality to Help Model Drugs
They are the two big tech buzzwords of the moment. Now a combination of 3D printing and augmented reality can help researchers design more effective drugs.
At Arthur Olsen’s Molecular Graphics Lab at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, research teams model biological viruses - including HIV - and attempt to work out what kind of proteins and ligand molecules can latch onto them, to see which might inhibit or disable them.
As Olsen shows in this video, 3D printing allows them to create accurate plastic models of virus segments and the potential drug molecules. With smart use of magnets they can be made to self-assemble, too.
