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7 comments:
I'm guessing the dimensions there are pretty tiny? Having done the
h. pylori thing, I guessed the 'h'
as helicobacter. Even though Wikipedia is down in protest today, found the 'h' in this case
represents halobacterium (which must possess a strange physiology?)
Along the lines of 'h', one of my
daughters wrote her doctoral thesis
on herpes simplex, something about
type 1 UL34 charge-cluster mutataion and nuclear laminar disruption in host cells. Went to
a meeting in Helsinki where they
all received t-shirts that read
'I don't have herpes, but I'm working on it'. -go figure-
So, when Wiki fires back up, I will
find out more about h. salinarum
The scale is fairly small - the center colony is about 2mm across.
Yes, the "H" is Halobacterium, though I suppose "strange physiology" is a matter of opinion. It does have some neat characteristics as far as organisms go, such as incredible radiation and salt tolerance... but it has so many mobile elements in its genome that it can be extremely frustrating to work on.
Rather than waiting for Wiki, which should be back up tomorrow, why not get your information from the guy who literally wrote the book on H. salinarum? Try this: http://halo4.umbi.umd.edu/~haloed/.
P.S. That herpes shirt is hilarious!
The red in the photomicrograph, is that clusters of the bacteria which seems to contain high amounts of carotenoids?..and the
crystaline structures, salt? My first guess was these somehow utilized salt, but apparently not?
Given the tendency of salt to be deleterious to bacteria, there must be unusual cell membrane
properties for protection...
Yes, the red are colonies and the crystals are salt. The pigment in question is bacteriorhodopsin, which is a light-driven proton pump.
About the salt, the organism lives in completely saturating NaCl conditons (the growth medium in the lab is 4.3M - about 25%) but use a ton of compatible solutes to maintain a normal intracellular NaCl concentration. There is some evidence that the cells can actively seed the formation of salt crystals as a survival strategy, and they can be recovered live from salt crystal inclusions that are perhaps millions of years old (the issue is figuring out whether the cells were there when the salt formed or whether they got in later through cracks, etc.).
Great!
I guess a 'picture is worth a thousand words'...
Guess this one is worth something at least... got a request from Wiley last week to use it in a microbiology textbook that will be in print next January, so I suppose that's pretty exciting.
An oddity of Mom Nature, that h.
salinarum resembles the micro version of h. peckii
..the bleeding tooth fungus.
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