Lil Chemistry Moodboard For Motivation 🧪🥼

"Microbial Rainbow" (detail), Tal Danino, 2018

source

what is she doing!! ~~~~ why!!!

Did we kill them?

Looking at what concentrations my antibiotics killed resistant Staphylococcus bacteria.

Higher antibiotic concentrations are on the right side, where there is clear liquid with no bacteria growth. It works!

Botox is made with botulinum toxin,, ok.

clostridium botulinum is anaerobic bacteria. form spores that release neurotoxin. cause paralysis

can be evident in honey. home canned foods. no oxygen

New Hope in the Fight Against Cancer: Scientists Discover Nutrient that Cancer Cells Crave

Arginine is an essential nutrient for cancer cells. Starving them could render tumors more vulnerable to the body’s natural immune response.

Cancer is one of the prominent causes of death globally, and discovering new methods to prevent and cure it is important for public health. Understanding the particular nutrients that cancer cells require is one of the strategies researchers are investigating to fight the disease.

Arginine is one of the important amino acids produced by our bodies naturally, and it is also abundantly found in food sources such as fish, meat, and nuts. According to the research published in Science Advances, cancer cells also need arginine to survive. It is possible to make tumors more susceptible to the body’s natural immune system and improve the effectiveness of treatment by depriving them of this nutrient.

The lack of this amino acid, which the researchers discovered to exist in various types of human cancers, forces the cancer cells to adapt. Cancer cells alter specific proteins to improve their ability to absorb arginine and other amino acids when their levels of that amino acid fall. Amazingly, these cells also induce mutations that lessen their reliance on arginine in an effort to keep growing.

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FOTD #114 : purple brittlegill! (russula atropurpurea)

the purple brittlegill (also blackish-purple russula) is a mycorrhizal fungus in the family russulaceae. it grows with both coniferous & deciduous trees !! it has been recorded in europe, asia & eastern north america. :-)

the big question : can i bite it?? yes, though it's not particularly recommended. it is said to taste.. hot?

r. atropurpurea description :

"the cap is 4–10 cm (1.5–4 in) in diameter. it is dark reddish purple, with a dark; sometimes almost black centre. at first it is convex, but later flattens, & often has a shallow depression. it can also be lighter in colour, or mottled yellowish. the stem is firm, white, & turns grey with age. it measures 3–6 cm in length & 1–2 cm in diameter. the closely set and fairly broad gills are adnexed to almost free, & pale cream, giving a spore print of the same colour."

[images : source & source] [fungus description : source]

Scientists make 'disturbing' find on remote island: plastic rocks

A 'plastic rock' found by Brazilian scientists on Trindade Island,one of the most remote places on the planet.

There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade island, a volcanic outcrop a three- to four-day boat trip off the coast of Brazil.

So geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was startled to find an unsettling sign of human impact on the otherwise untouched landscape: rocks formed from the glut of plastic pollution floating in the ocean.

Santos first found the plastic rocks in 2019, when she traveled to the island to research her doctoral thesis on a completely different topic—landslides, erosion and other “geological risks.”

She was working near a protected nature reserve known as Turtle Beach, the world’s largest breeding ground for the endangered green turtle, when she came across a large outcrop of the peculiar-looking blue-green rocks.

Intrigued, she took some back to her lab after her two-month expedition.

Analyzing them, she and her team identified the specimens as a new kind of geological formation, merging the materials and processes the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new ingredient: plastic trash.

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this might be a stupid question, but if theres a protein that multiple organisms need, wouldn't the a t g c genetic code for it be the same for different species? or at least closely related species? so theoretically some prompts/sequences should have multiple fitting organisms or closest fitting organisms

(i know it isn't this simple, but im wondering what the exact reason it doesn't work like that is, or what im missing)

not a stupid question, i'll try to answer it to the best of my understanding, but if anyone has anything to add, please do.

put shortly: you're right! if multiple organisms need a certain protein, the code in their DNA is generally the same in that region.

from a genetics perspective, all organisms are actually extremely similar. i'm sure you've heard that we humans share more than half our genetic information with bananas and such.

this is just a factor of how evolution works. every so often, a mutation occurs in an organism's genome, which has a chance to increase the fitness of that organism, which allows it to have more offspring, which changes the mix of alleles in the population. and this is how we get different species of things.

but, because we all share a common ancestor from a long, long, long, long time ago, we do maintain some similarities, especially in regions that code for things essential to life.

those regions where things are *different* is where we're able to tell one species from another, differentiating moths from trees and such. but, overall, all living organisms have a whole lot in common.

It's not the best "microbiology" art, but it has a very interesting background. Two bacteria from two different clinical cases were inoculated on the TSCB medium. This metallic blue spilling bacterium is of course Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The yellow one (positive reaction on TSCB medium) is Vibrio metschnikovii isolated from chronic UTI in a dog. It was an unusual microbiological diagnosis. But what can you do when even your dog has a better holiday than you? Problems with urination (in this dog) began just after returning from the Mediterranean, the owners and the dog intensively used the charms of warm and salty water.

diatom- any member of a large group comprising several genera of algea, specifically microalgea, found in oceans, waterways, and soils of the world. there's something beautiful about the little details of the world.