Bacteria

Fun

Microbial Advent Calendar – 06 Two Cousins from Opposite Poles

Day six of our Microbial Advent Calendar - today we look at two cousins from two poles: Octadecabacter arcticus and Octadecabacter antarcticus. They belong to the Roseobacter family within the Alphaproteobacteria class. These rod-shaped bacteria are found, like their name suggests, in icy water in the Arctic and Antarctica. They…

AdrienDecember 6, 2017

Fun Play with Data

Microbial Advent Calendar – 05 Winter’s black death

For the fifth day of our Microbial Advent Calendar I wanted to start with: Yersinia pestis, the party crasher of 1665 that pretty much ruined Christmas and everything else in London during that year and the following one. Although it did ruin everything, while reading about it I realized it…

AdrienDecember 6, 2017

Fun

Microbial Advent Calendar – 04 Microbial ice life

It's the Fourth day of our Microbial Advent Calendar! Today we have a look at the incredible diversity in the ecosystem of Santa's snowy surroundings. At first glance, ice sheets and glaciers are quite devoid of life, but they are in fact unique biomes. If you look closely those nutrient…

AdrienDecember 4, 2017

Fun

Microbial Advent Calendar – 03 Reindeer Microbiome

Santa Claus is often associated with his flying reindeer pulling his sled through the Christmas night. The story apparently comes from the 1837 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore. The poem describes the original magical reindeer, but Rudolf would only be added in 1939 by Robert…

AdrienDecember 3, 2017

Fun

Microbial Advent Calendar – 02 Ursidibacteria

Today in our Microbial advent calendar, we showcase Ursidibacter maritimus and Ursidibacter arcticus, two non motile gram negative bacteria isolated from the oral cavity of brown and polar bears! Would you go swab that? The original paper is there.

AdrienDecember 2, 2017

Fun

Microbial Advent Calendar – 01 Snowmaking Bacteria

This year I have decided to try to do a series of fun little posts entitled Microbial Advent Calendar over the course of December. Until Christmas I will try to come up with random microbial facts cetered around various Christmas, cold and winter themed topics. Snow and Christmas are two…

AdrienDecember 1, 2017

Fun Opinion

[Fun] Futurism & DNA Data

I am always amazed by what Science Fiction was able to predict right, predict wrong, and better than that what was completely unforeseen. Recently we were re-watching the first "Blade Runner" and I kept annoying my wife by pointing out elements falling into each category. Beyond the fact that 2019…

AdrienNovember 19, 2017

Bio-informatic [PwD] H. pylori

[Playing with Data] 607 pylori part III: Start digging

Hello Folks, it's been a while! I thought it would be time to continue this big Helicobacter pylori genomes experiment and keep the blog going on. We left with the previous post on preparing the data for our analyses. The main next step will be re-annotating all the genomes in…

AdrienNovember 14, 2017

Bio-informatic [PwD] H. pylori

[Playing with Data] 607 pylori part II: getting the data ready

In the previous post we had a look at some interesting features of Helicobacter pylori. Now it is time to finally get our hands on the data. This post will present the data preparation, how to get everything ready in a comparable way for easy analyses.Now that we know more…

AdrienApril 17, 2017

Bio-informatic [PwD] H. pylori

[Playing with data] 607 pylori part I : the introduction

Every story or study needs an introduction to give some context to what we are look at. When I first started writing the introduction about Helicobacter pylori, I realised quite quickly that my first attempts were massively paraphrasing again and again Wikipedia's summary. Because the Wikipedia article contains most of…

AdrienApril 10, 2017

Interesting Publication