I have a confession to make — even though I work with ciliates at the moment, I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with amoebae. I love them to the point that I get offended whenever anyone within earshot insults them as ‘formless’ or ‘shapeless blobs’. Amoebae might be fairly squishy, but one cannot [...]

Am back, I hope! Don’t pay any attention to the dust… “What dust?” Exactly. It took a while, but after finally attaining the necessary potentially-overpriced fancy pieces of glass, the lab scope can now take acceptable DIC images. Meaning yours truly can once again slightly misappropriate lab resources during strange hours of the night and [...]

We all know that eukaryotes are bigger than prokaryotes. On average. Mostly. Of course our pathetic attempts at generalisation are too often devastated in a counterattack by nature’s awesomest power: variation. There’s variation within species, making it a necessity to ultimately tie biology back to populations from time to time — but that’s a topic [...]

Welcome to the (ever so slightly late — sorry) 18th issue of the MolBio carnival! [insert some awful pun involving strains here] For those of us working with live cultures, it’s important to remember they have a pedigree, and ultimately come from somewhere outside the lab (after all, all life has a common ancestor somewhere…). [...]

(Part I here) In the previous post of this series (way too long ago…), we went on a little diving adventure into the microscopic world with our ocelloid-bearing Nematodinium, starting off with giant kelp forests and gradually zooming into the critters living on the blade surfaces and wading deep into the molecular world of genomes [...]

Don’t panic — welcome to the forty-second Carnival of Evolution! Please bear with me and pretend it’s still Dec 1st — I had just recently emerged from a wormhole in time, caused by being in a protistologist’s heaven: Dalhousie University in Halifax, with about 30-40 dedicated protist geeks milling about. It was distracting and a [...]

The most fundamental divide in the diversity of living creatures is arguably the one between prokaryotes (=bacteria*) and eukaryotes (the tiny island of cumbersomely complex cells that consists of protists. And a couple insignificant lineages that are hardly worth talking about). Much of the earth’s biota seems perfectly content with small, streamlined genomes and similarly [...]

And we’re back! The protists have never actually left, but some of us have pursued them (or rather, employment related to them) all the way into the cornfields of Indiana*. Apologies for the disappearance: I think it’s more precise to say that I clumsily tumbled here in August (still a bit dazed), rather than having [...]

Let’s go on an introductory tour of the protist world – a micro-dive if you will – led by our ocelloid-bearing submersible: let’s take Nematodinium out for a ride today. A seeing eye dinoflagellate. In fact, a seeing eye dino armed with nematocysts, a microscopic analogue of harpoons – just in case we see something [...]

Hello everyone, and welcome again to The Ocelloid! The intro post before was a little too formal and impersonal, I think, at least for my usual style anyway. So I’m going to overcompensate a little this time – mostly because I’m actually away at a large protistology conference as we speak (yay!), and between all [...]