Category: Evolution
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Prokaryote/Eukaryote
Where we explore the relatively young history of a fundamental divide in the tree of Life. A deliberately short history of systematics Systematics is the science of classifying life forms. As with almost anything in science, the first traceable attempts at classifying life date back to Aristotle. In his treaty The History of Animals (4th…
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Dead gods
Following is an extract from André Lwoff‘s lecture “The Concept of Virus“, given before the Society for General Microbiology on April 15th, 1957. I attempted to translate it into French just after. If you want to read the entire lecture (which I can only recommend), you can access it here : The Concept of Virus…
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The sorcerer’s apprentices of photosynthesis
This is the third part of my series on Dinophysis. If you didn’t read the first and second part, go read them and come back! We’ve now seen how Dinophysis was finally cultivated in the lab: by feeding it with its prey, the ciliate Mesodinium rubrum. Both of these microbes thrive by acquiring chloroplasts from foreign origin.…
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On swimming
Swimming: the act or art of sustaining and propelling the body in water. On our blue planet, many life forms were once faced with the same question: how do I move through that aqueous medium towards that prey/shelter/sexual partner over there? What I want to discuss here is how many possible answers there are to…
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Phycoplankton 