There are various different ways that pathogenic bacteria can damage and kill human cells, but one of the most common is by the production of toxic molecules. These small molecules are made inside the bacterial cell, the protein chain built using the DNA template and then often modified within the cell before being secreted directly [...]

For free-living organisms, the ability to sense and respond to the outside environment is crucial for survival. Eukaryotes, such as animals and plants, often have highly complex network systems in place to monitor their surroundings and respond effectively, but bacteria have developed a remarkably simple system. It’s called the ‘Two Component System’ because it literally [...]

In multicellular organisms it is essential that every cell behaves and does the job it was produced to perform. The survival of a multicellular organism depends on this  - every cell in your body is tightly controlled in terms of how big it can grow (fairly big), when it can reproduce (almost never) and what [...]

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 [...]

I have a soft-spot for plant biology. In my final year at university, having exhausted all of the bacteria-related biochemistry lectures, I took a bacteria-related lecture course with the plants department. It was a smaller department, and seemed a lot friendlier and nicer. Also the biscuits in the tea-room were cheaper. So I do like to write about [...]

The discovery that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria is quite recent and was proved fairly conclusively in 1984 when the Australian scientist Barry Marshall drank a petri-dish full of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori and five days later developed serious gastritis, which cleared after antibiotic treatment. As stomach ulcers are quite common, and can be a major [...]

This is the second part of a two-part collaboration post with James of Disease Prone. The first part can be found here and covers an introduction to the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii and its strange behaviour under blue light. This part looks at the biochemical details of the molecule that causes this behaviour. The ability of [...]

The biological world is getting smaller. When bacteria were first discovered they were no more than blobs, small intriguing shapes beneath the glass of a microscope. The development of more powerful microscopes and more detailed techniques started to unfold a whole new world of the very tiny. Nowadays the world explored by microbiologists is more detailed [...]

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful [...]

It’s one of those moments which make being a scientist worth every bit of sweat, toil and tears. A few years ago we designed some molecules that disrupted the interaction between two proteins involved in cancer. Making drugs like these is much like figuring out the right piece of wood that you would wedge into [...]

Why do people believe in God, ghosts, goblins, spirits, the afterlife and conspiracy theories? Two common threads running through these belief systems are what skeptic Michael Shermer in his insightful book “The Believing Brain” calls “patternicity” and “agenticity”. As the names indicate, patternicity refers to seeing meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Agenticity refers to seeing [...]

Chemists studying metabolism in living organisms usually classify it into two kinds; primary and secondary. Primary metabolism is concerned with the production and reactions of essential biomolecules like proteins, sugars and lipids. Secondary metabolism refers to the production of small molecules which, although not essential, are still important in a variety of key functions. Secondary [...]