- What laboratory techniques did Koch develop that are still used in microbiology today?
Microbiology
The study of bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms.
- What were the clear plaques d'Hérelle noticed in his bacterial cultures, and why didn't he dismiss them as contamination?
- What was Selman Waksman's reasoning for searching soil microbes for antibacterial compounds?
- How did Albert Schatz isolate streptomycin from Streptomyces griseus in October 1943?
- How did Waksman and Dubos come to look for antibiotics in ordinary soil?
- What founding insight about microbes launched the antibiotic era?
- How did Albert Schatz isolate streptomycin from Streptomyces griseus in Waksman's laboratory?
- Why did Waksman systematically screen soil organisms in search of antibiotics?
- What hypothesis led Thomas Brock to search Yellowstone's hot springs for life?
- What temperature does Thermus aquaticus live in, and why is that considered extreme?
- How did Boyer and Cohen prove that the recombinant plasmid was faithfully copied by E. coli's descendants?
- How large was the international collaboration that sequenced the yeast genome, and how long did it take?
- What shared bacteria connects the smell of Limburger cheese to the smell of feet?
- How many fungal cultures did Endo screen before finding mevastatin, the first statin, in a Penicillium mould?
- How did 1960s Army researchers test whether beards harbour dangerous microbes?
- Did washing fully remove bacteria and viruses from contaminated beards?
- What properties make infant gut bacteria well suited to meat fermentation and possible probiotic benefit?
- How was ivermectin isolated from soil bacteria collected across Japan?
- Why did the bacterial load on banknotes vary by denomination and by country?
- How did feeding cockroaches magnetotactic bacteria make the cockroaches themselves weakly magnetised?
- What did Dieter Oesterhelt discover about bacteriorhodopsin in salt-loving archaea?
- What method did Satari's team use to identify bacteria living in discarded chewing gum?
- How did the bacterial communities in gum vary by geography and gum brand?
- Why did Lucy Shapiro choose Caulobacter crescentus to study how a single cell can produce two different daughter fates?
- What regulatory circuits did Shapiro identify that determine whether a Caulobacter daughter cell swims or attaches to a surface?