It’s been an interesting week for the story of ancient bacterial diseases. My post last Saturday discussed how the bacteria that cause leprosy and whooping cough might have been present in the early hominids. Lucas Brouwers (of Thoughtomics) wrote about bacteria of livestock that developed during the early domestication of animals. While looking for a paper to write about [...]

I’ve written before about ancient diseases of the ice age, but this time I’m going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty [...]

Bacteria may be tiny little micro-organisms but like any other living creature there are certain molecules that they need for survival. No matter what niche a bacterial colony occupies, it eventually requires a source of iron. For bacteria that live within the human body, there is one incredibly iron-rich molecule that circulates throughout the human [...]

I’ve had an insanely hectic yet very important and productive time at work this month, so my blogging has fallen by the wayside. Next month I’ll be back to my normal blogging schedule, and just to kick things off here’s a post that first appeared in my old “Life of a Lab Rat” blog Niches [...]

I am completely snowed under with real work at the moment. There are two very important deadlines coming up which means that my time for blogging, or indeed any kind of non-work related writing, is severely limited. I’ll be putting up some archived posts from my old blog until I can get back to proper [...]

Having covered some weak intramolecular forces in my posts on hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces, I ventured into the world of the strong forces last month with ionic bonds. This month I’ll be looking at metallic bonding, the forces that hold together the atoms of all pure metals. There are a lot of metals [...]

This is a guest post from M. A. Loera Sánchez from the iGEM team UANL 2012. I have carried out a few small grammar edits but otherwise the essay is all his work, and I would like to thank him for the opportunity to host it on my blog. All references are below the main [...]

As a general rule in life there is always a bigger fish – for every predator there is a bigger one lurking that is ready to eat it. However it is also worth remembering that there is usually always a smaller fish as well; for every small irritating parasite there is something that can infect [...]

I got sent a wonderful story recently about a group of ten college students, from St Olaf college in Minnesota, who went on an electron microscopy course at the Boulder Laboratory for 3-D Electron Microscopy of the Cell in Colorado. As well as being shown the techniques and equipment in use, the students actually got a chance to use [...]

This month was quite a busy one for me; between frantic work deadlines and being slightly ill I didn’t really have time to promote, share or find a host for the MolBio carnival. Which means that this month there is no carnival. Instead I thought I’d write a bit about the MolBio carnival, why I [...]