If you celebrated Thanksgiving this week, then you likely spent the holiday eating untold amounts of food. From protein-rich foods, like turkey or ham, to foods rich in complex and simple carbs, like stuffing or sweet potatoes (my personal favorite), and everything in between. In order to get the most out of this feast, your digestive system needs a variety of mechanisms to extract the nutrients you need from a wide range of foods. Because these mechanisms evolved at a time when food was scarce and Thanksgiving-like feasts were a distant pipe dream, your body’s digestion system is remarkably efficient…
Comments closedTag: Bacteria
From vampire bacteria and glowing bacteria to magnetic bacteria and electric bacteria, microbes have developed some strange attributes over billions of years of evolution. That’s not even counting the entire class of microbes known as archaea that evolved to survive in some of Earth’s most hostile environments. This week, we’ll be discussing just a fraction of these strange microbes and the unique environments where they thrive. There are strange microbes in all three of the major domains of life: eukaryotes—the domain of humans, plants, and animals—bacteria, and archaea. The term archaea was first used in the late 1970s to describe…
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The last few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about the immune system and how it builds and maintains immunity to viral pathogens, like Covid-19. This week, I’d like to shift a bit to a different form of immunity that doesn’t have anything to do with the coronavirus (I know, a blog post that’s not about Covid-19—shocking) but one that has had major implications in the field of genetic engineering: bacterial immunity to viral infection. I mentioned briefly in my post about viruses that a large subset of viruses infect bacteria, called bacteriophages. Although bacteria are far less complex than humans are, they…
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