How to Build an Eye
I came across a paper today with this fantastic image that I simply had to write about. It’s another Open Access paper, published in PLOS Biology. The image shows an eye from a human,...
Jargon Wall Blog
Quorum Sensing and Virulence
Following on the heels of my recent post on Bacterial Biofilms, I wanted to write about quorum sensing next. This is a fascinating topic, and understanding how it works helps explain how a bacterium...
The Swarming Bacteria
This is a great bit of research on bacterial biofilms, published open access in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Researchers discovered that bacteria build an intricate network of tunnels within...
Glowing Japanese Eels and UnaG
Even though the original paper is not Open Access, this is still some awesome research. • A green fluorescent protein has been identified and isolated for the first time in a vertebrate. This protein...
Crucial and yet Controversial: WI-38 Cells
• Many people are aware of the history behind HeLa cells; isolated from Henrietta Lacks and used today in thousands of laboratories. But did you know about WI-38 cells? Isolated in June 1962 by Leonard Hayflick, these...
How to Build a Snake
This is a really fascinating bit of research carried out by scientists looking into the body plan of snakes. They discover how a single DNA letter change, a C to a T, was able...
