Mikrobiotch - 🔬🧪🧫🧬

gorgeous mold in a petri dish, Sporothrix schenckii

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most pleasant bacteria to identify from a microbiologist's perspective. In turn, from the veterinarian's point of view - one of the worst to treat.

working in a lab is cool and all but so much of your job is just waste clean up and washing dishes 💀

A microscopic spectacle: these diatoms (Bacillaria paxillifer) slide parallel to each other in large colonies. I can only speculate as to why, but I imagine it is a method to access sunlight for photosynthesis while also providing a quick route to safety. 250x magnification, 4x speed.

Willkommlangea reticulata

by Alison Pollack

Biology Keychains - Diatoms and Soil Bacteria!

Designed by me, available now on my Etsy!

I sometimes think about bacteria growing on (in?) an agar plate and how strange it must be from their perspective. To be taken from your (many times hostile) natural habitat and placed in (on?) an alien landscape made entirely of food that caters perfectly to your dietary needs. You live there, and your descendants thrive there for generations after, and then comes a Cataclysm. And they die in an inferno of steam and pressure, suddenly and unexpectedly.

And you never knew you were the fortunate ones. Your brethren lived their lives in other equally alien worlds, except theirs were tailored to kill them, torture them, or starve them of necessary nutrients. Their torment and your bliss serve a purpose ufathomable to you, a purpose of creatures so vast and unknowable, they might as well be Gods.

I think about bacteria sometimes.

Seriously, genetics is weird.

I was reading one paper on long noncoding RNAs and there's this one part that just really stood out to me.

So to catch everyone up, genetic data is stored as DNA. Then parts of it go through a process called transcription to build a strand of RNA. Certain RNAs get translated into proteins, but there are noncoding RNAs that don't make proteins but instead do a secret second thing (and I mean secret cause there are tons of ncRNAs that no one knows what they do). long noncoding RNAs are just noticeably longer than average.

Anyway, one lncRNA mentioned in the paper is called WINCR1. When the researchers managed to block it from being used, they noted that cells lost the ability to divide and there was one particular gene GADD45B, which is responsible for triggering apoptosis, was more common in the cells.

So my guess is one of WINCR1's jobs is to just confirm to the self-destruct system that the DNA isn't broken. Like, it being transcribed essentially tells the cell that that part of the DNA is still working and it can then go and turn off the kill switch.

So I guess cells are just designed to kill themselves as their default setting and WINCR1 is the drinking bird pressing the Y key to tell the system to not just blow up.

to all my researchers, students and people in general who love learning: if you don't know this already, i'm about to give you a game changer

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)

you get a few free graphs a month before you have to sign up, and i think the free version gives you up to 5 a month. there are paid versions but it really depends how often you need to use this kinda thing.