Microbiology

If you’ve watched the movie The Day after Tomorrow, you must remember the climate-related natural disasters that ravaged the human civilization. Though the events depicted in the movie are unrealistic, we are still dramatically altering Earth’s…

-- Just as a football game cannot be played with just one person, many tasks performed by cells require multiple players, too. For many bacteria to act as one, proper communication is key. One way of talking to a neighboring bacterium is called quorum…

-- Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as…

It takes a life every 30 seconds and sickens almost 250 million people a year… but this is no AIDS epidemic; no newly emerged disease that medical science is scrambling to control.  Malaria has been a scourge of mankind throughout recorded history,…

--In many cultures, including our own, bread constitutes a significant portion of the daily diet. However, how often do we stop to think about the unique material properties of the food that we eat and how those properties influence how bread (or any…

--The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion is shaping up to be one of the great disasters of our time. The equivalent of nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil has already been released into the Gulf of Mexico, endangering the local marine and coastal…

--Bacteria are ubiquitous. They defend and define us, constituting over 90% of the cells in the human body. They wield the ability to survive in the most extreme of environments, and the chemical reactions they catalyze hold the potential for vital…