Two fascinating projects:

Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell:

cells were very different when life began 3.5 billion to four billion years ago. Rather than small metropolises, they were more like a purse that carried instructions—consisting of just a membrane with genetic information inside. They lacked the structures and proteins that now make them tick. The question is: How then were they able to take in the nutrients necessary to survive and reproduce?

Harvard Medical School researchers report in Nature that they have built a model of what they believe the very first living cell may have looked like, which contains a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane. The membranes of modern cells consist of a double layer of fatty acids known as phospholipids. But in designing a membrane for their cell, scientists worked with much simpler fatty acids that they believe existed on a primeval Earth, when the first cell likely formed. The key, says study co-author Jack Szostak, a Harvard geneticist, was to develop one porous enough to let in needed nutrients (such as nucleotides, the units that make up genetic material, or DNA) but strong enough to protect the genetic material inside and keep it from slipping out after replicating.

(via Kurzeil)

A New Step In Evolution:

Lenski and his colleagues have witnessed a significant change. And their new paper makes clear that just because the odds of such a significant change are incredibly rare doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. Natural selection, in fact, ensures that sometimes it does. And, finally, it demonstrates that after twenty years, Lenski’s invisible dynasty still has some surprises in store.

(via OVO)

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A new study by Princeton University researchers shows for the first time that bacteria don’t just react to changes in their surroundings — they anticipate and prepare for them. The findings, reported in the June 6 issue of Science, challenge the prevailing notion that only organisms with complex nervous systems have this ability.
“What we have found is the first evidence that bacteria can use sensed cues from their environment to infer future events,” said Saeed Tavazoie, an associate professor of molecular biology, who conducted the study along with graduate student Ilias Tagkopoulos and postdoctoral researcher Yir-Chung Liu.

Full Story: Physorg

(via Kurzweil)

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Tiny freshwater organisms that have amazed scientists because of their sex-free lifestyle may have survived so well because they steal genes from other creatures, scientists reported on Thursday.

They found genes from bacteria, fungi and even plants incorporated into the DNA of bdelloid rotifers — minuscule animals that appear to have given up sex 40 million years ago.

Full Story: Reuters

(via Brainsturbator)

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Brainsturbator stitches together a number of articles, some of which you may have seen here, to make the case that we’re less in control of our minds and bodies than we think.

Full Story: Brainsturbator.

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Researchers in San Diego announce a new molecule that stops bacteria from mutating to become resistant to antibiotics.

Microbes have ruled the earth for more than a billion years; comparatively, we humans are just upstarts. Yet since the invention of penicillin in 1940, we have inflicted a crippling blow on many types of bacteria that make us ill or kill us.

But the bugs have struck back by activating DNA that is prone to errors when it replicates. This increases the chance that mutations will develop to fend off the mortal threat posed by antibiotics. In 2005, biochemist Floyd Romesberg of the Scripps Research Institute, near San Diego, announced that his lab had discovered a gene called LexA that switches on the error-prone DNA, enabling the microbe to mutate rapidly.

[…]

Now Romesberg has announced the discovery of a molecule that inhibits LexA’sability to cause mutations; it was found after the lab screened more than 100,000 possible compounds. The molecule also slips easily into a bacterial cell, which is critical to creating an effective tool to zap the bugs.

Full Story: Technology Review.

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For millennia, people have hitched beasts to plows to exploit the animals’ strength and energy. In a modern variant of that practice, scientists have chemically harnessed bacteria to a micromotor so that they can make the device’s rotor slowly turn.

Full Story: Science News.

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A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.

Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.

Full Story: Wired News.

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Apparently a hoax: Zombie Outbreak in Cambodia (can’t find this in the bbc archives or any other reference to it on google news… and it just sounds crazy)
(via Hyperstition).

Apparently real: It rained shrimp in California saw something about this on the Cabal yesterday, found this story on Google News.

And an old link from Slashdot: Bacteria programmed to act like computer.

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More useful bacteria communication:

Electrodes have been used to trap, interrogate and release individual bacteria in a bio-electronic circuit that could be used to construct nanoscale machines.

“One of the great challenges of nanotechnology remains the assembly of nanoscale objects into more complex systems,” says Robert Hamers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We think that bacteria and other small biological systems can be used as templates for fabricating even more complex systems.”

Link.

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It’s true:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells.

Link (via Dr Hyatt)

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A team at University of California, Los Angeles has found a way to communicate with bacteria through chemical signals.

Liao’s team persuaded the cells to make GFP simply as a convenient way to show that the acetate trigger was working. But in principle, they could use the acetate signal to trigger cells to do something more practical, such as making hydrogen or producing poisons to kill off diseased cells.

“You could use this approach as a Trojan horse idea to combat disease,” says Jeff Hasty, who works on gene modules at the University of California, San Diego. Modified cells of pathogenic bacteria could be introduced into a natural colony of the same cells, he says. Then, at a given chemical signal, the modified cells could be told to produce compounds that would kill off the bacteria.

Link (via Smart Mobs)

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Interesting piece from the BBC:

The UN University says “extremophiles”, creatures adapted to life in the polar wastes, are being relentlessly hunted in what is virtually a new gold rush.

Link (via Boing Boing)

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