A good start of the year by having a paper published. I blogged about the bioarxiv* version a while back so will keep it short this time: we injected environmental (water and sediment) samples in the Galleria caterpillar and, where … Continue reading
My colleagues Aimee Murray, Lihong Zhang and Will Gaze and I have an ongoing collaboration with colleagues from the Royal Cornwall Hospital John Lee and Richard Bendall on the detection of ‘Staphylococcus intermedius Group’ (SIG) in human infections. These bugs … Continue reading
I have been interested in bacterial pan genomes for some time: apart from acquiring mutations in genes shared between strains, bacteria are able to pick up genes (via several Lateral Gene Transfer processes), duplicate genes and also lose genes. These … Continue reading
First of all a very happy 2017 to all readers. It will be my new year’s resolution to update the blog more frequently (for instance, I have not blogged about really interesting visits to Prof Haiwei Luo in Hong Kong, … Continue reading
A long time coming, but the results obtained in NERC-funded research on evolutionary benefits (or lack thereof) of bacterial transformation have now been published. The work was carried out mainly by research tech Amy McLeman, who has since started her … Continue reading
Just out in the ISME journal, a paper on my favourite bacterium, Myxococcus xanthus. I did my PhD with Greg Velicer on this fascinating species which builds beautiful multicellular fruiting bodies that can be seen with the naked eye (click … Continue reading
