Researchers: Achromatium is special in many respects: It is 30,000 times larger than its “normal” counterparts that live in water and owing to its calcite deposits it is visible to the naked eye. It has several hundred chromosomes, which are most likely not identical. This makes Achromatium the only known bacterium with several different genomes.
Tag: bacteria
At Science News: Top Ten wrong results in science
Many of the mistakes listed seem just to be natural, though incorrect, assumptions of their day. This arsenic-based life though, now that was intriguing, if wrong.
Could symbiosis with bacteria play a role in the widespread use of magnetic navigation in animals?
Evolution News and Science Today describes the idea as “little more than a hunch” but one worth pursuing. It involves endosymbiosis and horizontal gene transfer. Its a start towards a reasonable explanation and way better than classic Darwinism.
What? An honest admission about the bacterial flagellum from Darwin-driven biology?
Researchers: “To build the machinery that enables bacteria to swim, over 50 proteins have to be assembled according to a logic and well-defined order to form the flagellum, the cellular equivalent of an offshore engine of a boat.” They ADMIT this? It sounds like a Recovery Meeting.
First cell with a mitochondrion was already complex
Already complex? No intermediate forms? Where have we heard that before?
A science fiction writer explains why he thinks life is more than just matter
Geoffrey Simmons, author of The Adam Experiment, points out that many animals and even bacteria show behavior that seems like thinking.
Researchers: How two bacteria of different species become one
Researcher: “They mix their machinery to survive or do metabolism, and that’s kind of extraordinary, because we always assumed that each and every organism has its own independent identity and machinery,” said Papoutsakis.
Could bacteria have survived a trip from Earth to Mars?
Some see this as evidence that the universe is teeming with life on numberless planets. But what if we find fossil bacteria on Mars with genetics eerily similar to the ones we have on Earth? That could end up undermining such claims. But we shall see.
Bacteria die screaming
LiveScience: Through necrosignaling, bacteria alert their swarming neighbors to the presence of a deadly threat, and thereby save the majority of the swarm (a bacterial colony that’s on the move).
Bacteria are smarter than we think
At Wired: As they cleared paths of food, the E.coli tended to move toward unexplored, broth-rich areas, which ultimately helped them evacuate the maze. It took about 10 hours for about 1 percent of the multiple generations of bacteria to collectively solve the puzzle. That may not sound fast, but it’s five times faster than if the organisms had just been swimming around randomly, says Phan.
Claim: Microbes that are – individually – 100 million years old come out of hibernation…
ScienceDaily: Morono was initially taken aback by the results. “At first I was skeptical, but we found that up to 99.1% of the microbes in sediment deposited 101.5 million years ago were still alive and were ready to eat,” he said.
And now, it turns out, some bacteria eat manganese
Researchers discovered this by accident: when the bacteria left manganese oxide in a dirty lab jar.
At Quanta: Bacteria are now seen as very complex too
Cepelewicz: The very existence of organelles in these bacteria, coupled with intriguing parallels to the more familiar ones that characterize eukaryotes, has prompted scientists to revise how they think about the evolution of cellular complexity — all while offering new ways to probe the basic principles that underlie it.
Algae routinely steal genes from bacteria
One wonders how much of their genome they steal from more closely related species (as opposed to schoolbook Darwinian evolution).
Another Darwin-kicker?: Diversity-Generating Retroelements (DGR)
A reader writes: They have a mechanism by which they can mutate a specific part of the DNA, in a pattern and rate that’s different from random mutation.