Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your microbes! Congrats to Margot P. our randomly drawn GIANTmicrobes winner. Margot, I’ll email you details. Thanks to everyone for your fun and inspiring comments. Below is my Valentine’s to all of you. An explanation of the glowing words are below the image. One of the most amazing discoveries about bacteria in the last decade or so is quorum sensing. Dr. Bonnie Bassler discovered that many bacteria secrete special chemicals that help them determine how many other bacteria of the same species are around. When a certain number of bacteria (determined by the chemical concentration) are present – the “quorum” – then all of these bacteria turn on a different set of genes. In the case of some species of Vibrio, Pseudomonas, and Photobacterium the genes activated with quorum sensing are for bio-luminescence. THEY GLOW. Isn’t that awesome? Dr. Bassler’s TED talk is below. As well as a great scientist, she’s a fabulous speaker. I faked the quorum sensing plate above, but if you’d like to see some of the real glowing Valentine’s – check out Dr. Mark Martin’s blog. He and his undergraduate students do a lot of fun projects like this at the University of Puget
GIANTmicrobes – When Teachers Throw Things
Think these little critters are cute? Enter a comment below for a chance to win one! (contest closed 2/14/2016) How do you understand something you can’t see? That’s the inspiration behind GIANTmicrobes ™, those adorable stuffed microbes 1 million times the size of the actual microbes. Yes, microbe “stuffies”. Better than that, they are plush microbe stuffies based on the shape and features of real microbes, from flagella on E. coli to buds on the Saccharomyces yeast. Additionally, they have cute big eyes and some accessories such as a cape for MRSA and a knife and fork for flesh-eating bacteria to make them even more fun. Be still your beating heart? There are heart cells and all other sorts of microscopic cells too. Why would anyone want a gigantic stuffed microscopic cell? Good question. GIANTmicrobes make teaching, outreach, and every day fun and educational. What are GIANTmicrobes? Microscopic organisms often have an image problem with macro-organisms like us. People either don’t know about them or think they are shapeless blobs. However, microorganisms come in a variety of shapes and interesting structures. Ranging from rods, spheres, chains, or spirals typical of bacteria to bizarre shapes of protists. Cilia, pilli, and flagella