Words about science and hiking
Giant viruses are cool. Their genomes are bigger than those of many bacteria (especially endosymbionts), and they encode many housekeeping functions that are not obviously necessary for the viral lifestyle. They blur boundaries between the neat little categories we use to describe biological entities and thus remind us that those categories are conveniences, not reality. Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
Another paper about another phage protein isn’t usually cause for notice. There are lots of phage, and they have lots of proteins, and figuring out what they all do could occupy the efforts of scientists for several millennia. Which is precisely my point. What’s sometimes lost in all the excitement about genomics is that it Read More …