491: Less Liquid Lands Losing Lichens
BacterioFiles
This episode: Trends of declining lichen populations and biocrust cover overall match trends of increasing temperatures in Colorado dryland! (6.4 MB, 9.3 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Takeaways: Global climate change is affecting almost every natural system on the planet, in predictable and also sometimes unexpected, complex ways. Microbes perform key roles in many different ecosystems, providing and recycling important nutrients and even macroscopic structure. One example of this is biocrusts in dryland environments, such as areas in the western US with low annual...
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490: Parasitoid Pox Partners
BacterioFiles
This episode: A virus partners with a parasitoid wasp to help exploit fruit fly victims! (7.7 MB, 11.2 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Actinomadura livida Takeaways Parasitoid wasps have an interesting lifestyle: they inject their eggs into the larvae of other insects, and their young hatch and grow up by consuming the host from the inside. Some of these wasps also inject a virus along with the egg, which supports the wasp offspring by suppressing the host immune system. Most of these parasitoid helper viruses are integrated into the host wasp genome and are translated and...
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489: Soil Smell Synthesis Significance
BacterioFiles
This episode: Many organisms produce the smell of earth, geosmin, and many others can sense it–but why? (6.0 MB, 8.7 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Takeaways The smell of soil or earth is one of the most recognizable smells, and comes largely from a chemical called geosmin, produced by many different kinds of bacteria. Many animal species are sensitive to geosmin, some attracted by it and others repelled. But it is still not entirely understood what is the evolutionary benefit to the microbes that produce it, or the reason why different animals are...
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488: Social Slimes Synchronize Sorties
BacterioFiles
This episode: Slime mold amoebas Fonticula alba have interesting and unique foraging and reproductive behaviors! (7.3 MB, 10.6 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Takeaways How did life develop from single-celled organisms acting independently into the complex, multicellular organisms we see and are today? Although it is difficult to look back through time to study how ancient organisms may have developed along this path, it is possible to investigate modern organisms that occupy a zone in between single-celled and multicellular, to see if we can get some hints to our...
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487: Probiotic Pulverizes Pathogen Persisters
BacterioFiles
This episode: A probiotic strain of E. coli can target and destroy pathogens that survive a treatment of antibiotics! (8.2 MB, 12 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Streptomyces griseoruber Takeaways Antibiotic resistance is becoming more and more of a problem as bacterial pathogens develop resistance to more and more drugs. For some people who develop an infection that is resistant to everything, it's as if they were living back in the days before antibiotics were discovered, when all they could do was pray for survival. New antibiotics are needed, but even more needed...
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486: Biohybrid Bacteria Build Biomass
BacterioFiles
This episode: Incorporating light-absorbing molecules into bacterial membranes can allow bacteria to use solar energy to transform nitrogen gas into fertilizer! (6.5 MB, 9.9 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Wheat dwarf virus Takeaways Turning nitrogen gas into biologically useful compounds, such as protein or ammonia for fertilizer, is an essential part of the global nitrogen cycle and therefore, for agriculture. Today much fertilizer is produced from nitrogen gas by a chemical process that requires large amounts of energy, contributing to global warming. But certain...
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485: Small Cell Sculpts Sticky Snot Sphere
BacterioFiles
This episode: A marine protist predator traps prey microbes in an attractive bubble of mucus, eats what it wants, and lets the rest sink, possibly sequestering significant amounts of carbon! (7.8 MB, 11.4 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Bat associated cyclovirus 1 Takeaways The oceans have a lot of unique, unexplored life in them. This is true on a macro level but even more on a microscopic level, with many different kinds of microbes of various groups with fascinating life strategies. And despite being microscopic, with enough of them around, they can affect the whole...
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484: Bacteriophages Boost Brains
BacterioFiles
This episode: Certain phages in the gut are linked with increases in performance on some cognitive tests! (7.5 MB, 10.9 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Streptomyces bikiniensis Takeaways Our gut microbiota includes a large number of viruses, mostly bacteriophages. These fall into two groups, the lytic kind that infects and reproduces itself immediately in a host, and the lysogenic kind that can integrate its genome into the host bacterial genome and remain dormant for long periods. In this study, a higher proportion of lysogenic phages was correlated with increased...
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483: Recycling Resources Raises Robustness
BacterioFiles
This episode: Adding tags to proteins to increase their degradation can help engineered bacteria grow and survive better under various conditions! (7.3 MB, 10.4 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Lactococcus virus sk1 Takeaways Engineering bacteria with new genetic pathways allows us to use them in many new and promising applications. Some of these are industrial fermentations, growing large quantities of bacteria to use as catalysts for production of chemicals of interest, such as biofuels. But in other cases, engineered microbes can be most useful in less controlled...
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482: Colony Concentric Clock Construction
BacterioFiles
This episode: Single-celled bacteria can act independently to create patterns and structure in their biofilm communities! (9.6 MB, 14.0 minutes) Show notes: Microbe of the episode: Dictyostelium discoideum Skipper virus Takeaways Large multicellular organisms like us have interesting mechanisms for using one set of genetic instructions present in all cells to form a large, complex community of many different types of cells with different structures and functions, all working together. Single-celled microbes do not have the same requirements for genetic or structural complexity, but...
info_outlineThis episode: Trends of declining lichen populations and biocrust cover overall match trends of increasing temperatures in Colorado dryland!
Download Episode (6.4 MB, 9.3 minutes)
Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Cherry chlorotic rusty spot associated partitivirus
Takeaways:
In this study of a Colorado park over more than 20 years, important species of symbiotic fungi and photosynthetic microbes in the form of lichens have declined significantly. The land is mostly untroubled by grazing or human activity, but changes in climate and moisture and the presence of invasive plants could affect lichens. However, the temperature increase over the decades showed the best correlation with the lichen decline. The loss of these species could lead to nutrient shortages in the long term for these communities.
Journal Paper:
Finger-Higgens R, Duniway MC, Fick S, Geiger EL, Hoover DL, Pfennigwerth AA, Van Scoyoc MW, Belnap J. 2022. Decline in biological soil crust N-fixing lichens linked to increasing summertime temperatures. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 119:e2120975119.
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