Cool discovery of bactriophage infection that uses a head filament to catch bacterial flagellum. And the motions of the flagellum then draw the virus in and then away to increase chances of infection. Quite cool bit of detective work to reveal years of interesting infection rate data.
Region awash in a new wave of wee breweries with big plans – The Boston Globe
“Where others see barroom taps crowded with beer options, Chris Lohring sees opportunity brewing.”
A nice article on the state of breweries in the region, the business, and the entrepreneurs. Quite exciting.
As for me, I’ll stick to small time 5-gal brewing.
Photos: Mass. breweries and their top beers – Boston.com
“Brewing good beer isn’t something unique to Ireland, Germany, or the mountains of Vermont. In fact, there are quite a few craft breweries in Massachusetts that find an appreciative customer base both inside and beyond the borders of the Bay State.
“Here are 10 breweries and brewpubs that produce their suds in the state, as well as the most popular beers they produce.”
Photos: Local craft breweries are on the rise – Boston.com
“A new wave of niche breweries is the most noteworthy since the mid-1990s. New England is playing catch-up with California and other parts of the country already experiencing their own craft beer boomlets.”
Take a look at the inner workings of a brewery.
Sociometric Solutions deploying digital ‘dog tags’ to track employee interactions – Boston.com
“The digital dog tag, which Watertown-based Sociometric Solutions calls the “sociometric badge,” has a built-in microphone that can gauge how much you talk (versus how much you listen); an accelerometer that can tell how much you sit versus how much you move around; and an infrared sensor that can tell when you’re facing other people wearing the badges.”
Impact of Endofungal Bacteria on Infection Biology, Food Safety, and Drug Development: PLoS Pathogens
“The filamentous mould Rhizopus microsporus is a member of the zygomycetes (lower fungi). While some strains serve as food fermenting fungi, others represent infamous plant pathogens and opportunistic human pathogens. Recently, it was shown that some strains of R. microsporus are associated with symbiotic bacteria. Here, we outline why these organisms are important for human health and how they can be exploited for drug development. Furthermore, we illustrate what the investigation of bacterial–fungal symbiosis can teach us about the evolution of pathogenicity factors in general.”
Endosymbiont bacteria in a fungus? That’s so cool. And this review (link below) talks about the impact of this endosymbiont in various areas. It also goes into the biology of symbiosis. Quite fascinating. Read it.
Follow our efforts to get bio panels into SXSW 2012
Folks, @thisischristina (and writer at SciAm’s Oscillator) and I both submitted panel proposals for SXSW 2012. We’re going to need some help getting into the program.
Voting is from 15aug to 02sep with program announcements starting end of October. [see Panel Picker pages]
Save this link [https://www.molecularist.com/tag/sxsw2012] to keep up with info about this process – I’ll be interviewing speakers, going more in-depth about the topics, and more.
UPDATE 09aug11 – corrected to SXSW 2012
UPDATE 26aug11 – Here’s my panel [http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10348] and Christina’s panel [http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10478]
Editor Explains ‘New Philosophy’ of Open Access Scientist-Run Journal – ScienceInsider
“The new open access biomedical journal announced last month by a trio of research charities now has an editor-in-chief. He is cell biologist Randy Schekman, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, who now edits the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Good questions in this interview, revealing more about the new pub. The most interesting tid-bit to me is this pub has 3 years of operating money to build the publication before they need to decide on a biz model. Hopefully, by then, they’ll find some interested way to fund the pub or realize that PLoS still has the best model (charging authors).
Bacteria Flash Like Christmas Lights – ScienceNOW
“But why would it need to, even for a second? The researchers aren’t sure, but they believe that depolarizing their membranes may allow the bacteria to kick out charged molecules they’ve accumulated, such as toxins or antibiotics. In fact, Cohen says, the finding could be a potential antibiotic resistance mechanism. When the researchers put a dye molecule that, like many antibiotics, was positively charged into the bacteria, they kicked it out. Previous researchers had observed this phenomenon but couldn’t explain it.”
This is indeed cool. With video as well [http://bcove.me/qeax5utv]. Just one more example how we keep discovering things there were always discoverable and right under our noses the whole time.
Ginkgo organism engineers and the pipe – Ginkgoo blog
“Here I’ll try to give a high-level picture of Ginkgo’s pipeline for organism engineering. If you’ve checked out our webpage, you’ll see that we have several different organism engineering projects happening at Ginkgo that span several different hosts. Our goal was to build out a pipeline that could support the engineering of all these very different organisms for very different purposes but that uses a shared pipeline. To accomplish this goal, we deliberately opted to decouple design from fabrication. Ginkgo organism engineers place requests via our CAD/CAM/LIMS software system. Those requests are then batched and run on Ginkgo’s robots.”
This is indeed exciting. These folks are among the most experienced in synthetic biology and they are finally taking their engineering skills to the next level. They are reducing organism creation to a CAD request to an automated pipeline by an organism engineer. Really cool. [See more here: http://ginkgobioworks.com/works.html]