MedWorm provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest medical blog items that have been tagged with 'extremophiles'. Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:58:29 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3567928&cid=t_104866_107_f&fid=35026&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F%7Er%2FTheTreeOfLife%2F%7E3%2FIy3E1lzK42g%2Farchaea-in-news-growing-trend.html Archaea, the so-called "third" branch in the tree of life, don't get in the news much but good when they do and for some reason, they are getting in the news more and more these days.  See below for some links to news stories. Coaxing Fuel From Extreme Bugs - Forbes.com Single origin of life story All Species Evolved From Single Cell, Study Finds Study proves Darwin's theory of universal common ancestry The Proof Is in the Proteins: Test Supports Universal Common Ancestor for All Life Asphalt Lake microbes Is This What Aliens Look Like? Life May Exist in Titan's Liquid Hydrocarbon Lakes Earth's Asphalt Lakes Hint at Possibility of Life on Titan Life found in liquid asphalt lake Life in the sticky lane Acid mine microbes with tiny genomes (work of Baker, Banfield, et al). Tiny microbe... The Tree of Life blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3567928 Sat, 15 May 2010 17:37:46 +0100 3567928 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2761547&cid=t_104866_77_f&fid=37259&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.horizonpress.com%2Fblogger%2F2009%2F09%2Fconference-alert.html September 12 - 16, 2010 8th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON EXTREMOPHILES Azores, Portugal Further information EXTREMOPHILES 2010 An international forum to appreciate the current state of the art of Extremophiles and to discuss how science in this field can contribute to finding solutions to the challenges we face in the future. Suggested reading: Archaea: New Models for Prokaryotic BiologyFull range of books on microbiology at Microbiology Books (Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists.) Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2761547 Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:38:00 +0100 2761547 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1713976&cid=t_104866_131_f&fid=35005&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2Ffungalcompgenomics%2F%7E3%2F368580845%2F An outbreak of a fungal infection called "white-nose syndrome" is killing bats in the Northeastern US.  This New Scientist article mentions the outbreak briefly and an NPR story and recent Boston Globe story also gives it some coverage.  Sounds like we still don't know much about the causal agent or how it is killing the bats at this time, but some researchers, including Elizabeth Buckles at Cornell University, Vishnu Chaturvedi at NY State Dept of Health, and Jon Reichard at Boston University are working on it. This is of course old news if you read what Hyphoid Logic has been saying. That there is a previously undescribed cold loving fungus sounds very interesting, there have been some recent discoveries of psychrophilic fungi like Cryptococcus laurentii and Rhodotorula himalayensis so... Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1713976 Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:09:48 +0100 1713976 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1276043&cid=t_104866_131_f&fid=35005&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2Ffungalcompgenomics%2F%7E3%2F245144266%2F I've been too busy to post much these last few days, but here are a few links to some papers I found interesting in my recent browsing. FOLy: an integrated database for the classification and functional annotation of fungal oxidoreductases potentially involved in the degradation of lignin and related aromatic compounds - so a database of these enzymes from several different fungi including some of the white rot fungi. I'll be curious to see how the brown rot fungus Postia's genome complement compares. Evolution of host resistance in a toxin-producing bacterial–fungal alliance. Some more fungal-bacterial symbosis work in Rhizopus that follows on previous work that shows that the bacterial make a toxin that is anti-mitotic, so how does this not affect the host fungus? The authors use a... Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1276043 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:45:22 +0100 1276043 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=645175&cid=t_104866_131_f&fid=35005&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2Ffungalcompgenomics%2F%7E3%2F120548283%2F A recent paper in PLoS One entitled Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi describes some pretty amazing results that have gotten some press lately. The lead author, Dr Dadachova, spoke on NPR’s Science Friday last week about how melanized fungi are able to use ionizing radiation for energy as seen in the enhanced growth in their experiments. While this is the first report of such as result, the fact that innovation occurs wherever there is free energy is not surprising. As mentioned by Arturo Casadevall this story in the spring when he was gave a seminar at Berkeley, marine organisms that live near undersea hydrothermal vents have been able to photosynthesize the infrared light emitted from the vent. He discussed th... Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=645175 Wed, 30 May 2007 16:12:10 +0100 645175 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=486614&cid=t_104866_131_f&fid=35005&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffungalgenomes.org%2Fblog%2F2007%2F02%2Fgut-check%2F Ever wonder what goes on in a cow’s multi-chambered stomach? Probably not. I did think about it a little more after a trip to a teaching farm during grad school where we saw a cow with a fistula. This hole provides access to the cows stomach so that samples can be drawn of the community living in the gut and understand how the bovine stomach can digest the recalcitrant cellulose of grasses. Of course all kinds of lovely things live in the dark, anaerobic environment. In fact there is a delicately balanced community of species. When cows are fed corn instead of grass this affects the rumen acid content and allows pathogenic E. coli like O:157 to survive. So far I don’t seen any JGI proposal for sequencing of the gut communities of rumens, but maybe that should be proposed. Rumen... Fungal Genomes and Comparative Genomics blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=486614 Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:43:50 +0100 486614