Microbes found in natural asphalt lake

(PhysOrg.com) -- A lake of natural hot liquid asphalt in Trinidad and Tobago has been found to be teeming with microbes despite the toxic environment. The lake, aptly named Pitch Lake (since pitch is the old name for tar), ...

Geographic isolation drives the evolution of a hot springs microbe

Sulfolobus islandicus, a microbe that can live in boiling acid, is offering up its secrets to researchers hardy enough to capture it from the volcanic hot springs where it thrives. In a new study, researchers report that ...

MIT reels in RNA surprise with microbial ocean catch

An ingenious new method of obtaining marine microbe samples while preserving the microbes' natural gene expression has yielded an unexpected boon: the presence of many varieties of small RNAs — snippets of RNA that act ...

Engineers uncover new mechanism for gene transfer

If you still remember that "Dear King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti," you'll likely also recall the corresponding taxonomic ranks of biology: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. The domains ...

A bacterial toolkit for colonizing plants

Using a novel experimental approach, Max Planck researchers have discovered a core set of genes required by commensal bacteria to colonize their plant hosts. The findings published in Nature Communications may have broad ...

Microbial communities stay healthy by swapping knowledge

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a microbial community phenomenon that essentially equates to teaching neighbors how to complete necessary tasks by ripping out and sharing parts of the brain.

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