100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005) Updated +Created
Hosted by Bill Nye.
Physics topics:
biology topics:
  • Leeuwenhoek microscope and the discovery of microorganisms, and how pond water is not dead, but teeming with life. No sample of course.
  • 1831 Robert Brown cell nucleus in plants, and later Theodor Schwann in tadpoles. This prepared the path for the idea that "all cells come from other cells", and the there seemed to be an unifying theme to all life: the precursor to DNA discoveries. Re-enactment, yay.
  • 1971 Carl Woese and the discovery of archaea
Genetics:
Medicine:
  • blood circulation
  • anesthesia
  • X-ray
  • germ theory of disease, with examples from Ignaz Semmelweis and Pasteur
  • 1796 Edward Jenner discovery of vaccination by noticing that cowpox cowpox infected subjects were immune
  • vitamin by observing scurvy and beriberi in sailors, confirmed by Frederick Gowland Hopkins on mice experiments
  • Fleming, Florey and Chain and the discovery of penicillin
  • Prontosil
  • diabetes and insulin
Archaea are more cosely related to the eukaryotes than bacteria Updated +Created
Bacterial cell wall Updated +Created
E. Coli origin of replication Updated +Created
Appears to have just one, other bacteria can have more. TODO position in NCBI. Sequence determined in 1979: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC382992
Eukaryotes can do phatocytosis due to their cytoskeleton Updated +Created
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) page 53 suggests that one tremendous advantage of eukaryotes over bacteria is their ability to change shape due to the presence of the cytoskeleton, and the lack of a rigid bacterial cell wall.
Imagine in a world where there are only bacteria, and you can eat entire bacteria in one go, what a huge advantage that is!
Evolution Updated +Created
Video 1.
The Evolution of Bacteria on a 'Mega-Plate' Petri dish by Kishony Lab (2016)
Source. They've made a huge Petri dish with bands of different concentrations of antibiotic, and then they visualize Escherichia coli mutations as new strains manage to make their way into the highest antibiotic concentration strip. mind blowing.
Immune system Updated +Created
A cool thought: bacteria like E. Coli replicate every 20 minutes. A human replicates every 15 years. So how can multicellular beings possibly cope with the speed of evolution of parasites?
The answer is that within us, the adaptive immune system is a population of cells that evolves very quickly. So in a sense, within our bodies there is fast cell-level non-inheritable evolution happening daily!
Kingdom (biology) Updated +Created
There's six to eight in different systems of the end of the 20th century:This mess is because people don't realize that clades are all that really matter.
Lysozyme Updated +Created
Breaks up peptidoglycan present in the bacterial cell wall, which is thicker in Gram-positive bacteria, which is what this enzyme seems to target.
Part of the inate immune system.
It is present on basically everything that mammals and birds excrete, and it kills bacteria, both of which are reasons why it was discovered relatively early on.
Mitochondrial endosymbiosis Updated +Created
Likely happened between an archaea and a bacteria.
NeoCarbonFood Updated +Created
Previously known as "Food From Electricity", "NeoCarbonFood" sounds like a more commercializable version of it.
Uses electricity to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen molecules, and then use bacteria that do hydrogen chemosynthesis to convert it into food.
Experiment background Updated +Created
PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.
In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.
The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".
Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.
All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!
The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:
  • OMG, this is so labour intensive, why haven't they automated this
  • OMG, this is frightening, all the 8 hours of work I've just done are present in that tiny plastic tube
  • Amazing! Look at that apparatus! And the bio people are like: I've used this a million times, it's cheap and every lab has one, just work faster and don't break you piece of junk!
Phylogenetic tree Updated +Created
It is important to note that due to horizontal gene transfer, the early days of life, and still bacteria to this day due to bacterial conjugation, are actually a graph and not a tree, see also: Figure "Graph of life".
Definitely have a look at: coral of life representations.
Prokaryote Updated +Created
Not a clade, and therefore a term better forgotten!
A clade name for arkarya is a proposed clade name for archaea plus eukarya.