Microbiology Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Microbiology. Here they are! All 66 of them:

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
Disgust is intuitive microbiology
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
Charles Darwin
Always trust a microbiologist because they have the best chance of predicting when the world will end
Teddie O. Rahube
In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
Edward Tatum
Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
The principal advantages of living in your station’s section house is that it is cheap, close to work and it’s not your parents’ flat. The disadvantages are that you’re sharing your accommodation with people too weakly socialised to live with normal human beings, and who habitually wear heavy boots. The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like an avalanche.
Ben Aaronovitch (Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #1))
Quick dinner with ... Ang [Lee] and his wife Jane who's visiting with the children for a while. We talked about her work as a microbiologist and the behaviour of the epithingalingie under the influence of cholesterol. She's fascinated by cholesterol. Says it's very beautiful: bright yellow. She says Ang is wholly uninterested. He has no idea what she does. I check this out for myself. 'What does Jane do?' I ask. 'Science,' he says vaguely.
Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
It was a fungal party hellscape.
Robin Sloan (Sourdough)
If I set out to prove something I am no real scientist-- I have to learn to follow where the facts lead me-- I have to learn to whip my prejudices...
Spallanzani
Ro rumpled his hair. “Listen to my little elf boy, sounding all knowledgeable about microbiology and stuff! I’ve never been so proud.
Shannon Messenger (Flashback (Keeper of the Lost Cities #7))
Since the idea of packaging is to protect food from bacteria,” Andrady observes, “wrapping leftovers in plastic that encourages microbes to eat it may not be the smartest thing to do.” But even if it worked, or even if humans were gone and never produced another nurdle, all the plastic already produced would remain— how long? “Egyptian pyramids have preserved corn, seeds, and even human parts such as hair because they were sealed away from sunlight with little oxygen or moisture,” says Andrady, a mild, precise man with a broad face and a clipped, persuasively reasonable voice. “Our waste dumps are somewhat like that. Plastic buried where there’s little water, sun, or oxygen will stay intact a long time. That is also true if it is sunk in the ocean, covered with sediment. At the bottom of the sea, there’s no oxygen, and it’s very cold.” He gives a clipped little laugh. “Of course,” he adds, “we don’t know much about microbiology at those depths. Possibly anaerobic organisms there can biodegrade it. It’s not inconceivable. But no one’s taken a submersible down to check. Based on our observations, it’s unlikely. So we expect much-slower degradation at the sea bottom. Many times longer. Even an order of magnitude longer.” An order of magnitude—that’s 10 times—longer than what? One thousand years? Ten thousand?
Alan Weisman (The World Without Us)
The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.
Theodor Schwann (Mikroskopische Untersuchungen Uber Die Ubereinstimmung in Der Struktur Und Dem Wachstum Der Tiere Und Pflanzen (German Edition))
Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs’ vital organs the wrong color.
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
Twenty years after Waksman’s death, the American Society for Microbiology made a somewhat belated attempt at amends by inviting Schatz to address the society on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of streptomycin’s discovery. In recognition of his achievements, and presumably without giving the matter a lot of thought, it bestowed on him its highest award: the Selman A. Waksman medal. Life sometimes really is very unfair.
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
I take it you’ve never seen a Flasher at work before?” Elwin asked her. “No,” Tarina admitted. “But I’ve wanted to, ever since I first heard the legends.” “Legends,” Bo scoffed. “You’re looking at a party trick—nothing more. You want to see something legendary, you should visit our microbiology labs.” “Yes, nothing’s more exciting than bacteria,” Elwin muttered. “And just so we’re clear—my ‘party trick’ saved your princess’s life.
Shannon Messenger (Flashback (Keeper of the Lost Cities #7))
From boiling thermal hot springs to deep beneath the Antarctic ice, microorganisms can be found almost everywhere on earth in great quantities. Microorganisms (or microbes, as they are also called) are small organisms. Most are so small that they cannot be seen without a microscope.
Nina Parker (Microbiology)
Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease.
Brenda Wilmoth Lerner (Infectious Diseases: In Context)
Shapiro concludes his twenty-three-page paper with this remarkable statement . . . The take-home lesson of more than half a century of molecular microbiology is to recognize that bacterial information processing is far more powerful than human technology. . . . These small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere’s geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics, and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives.21
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.
Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. “Hi, uh. I’m Jack.” Kim took it. “Jack what?” “Huh?” “Your last name, silly.” “Jackson.” She blinked at him. “Your name is Jack Jackson?” He blushed. “No, uh, my first name’s Rhett, but I hate it, so…” He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. “Well, Jack, what’s your field of study?” “Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I’m working on a research project at the institute.” “Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini’s getting a little low.” “I’ve got that, one second.” He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well. “What do you want to do after you’re done with the project?” Kim continued. “Depends on what I find.” She sent him a simmering smile. “What are you looking for?” Immediately, Jack’s eyes lit up and his posture straightened. “I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, or one with a similar ancestry that could hopefully lead to rebuilding extinct animals via surrogate birth or in-vitro fertilization. We’re on the edge of breaking that code, and if we do, it would mean that we could engineer all kinds of life and reverse what damage we’ve done to the planet’s ecosystem.” Kim stared. “Right. Would you excuse me for a second?” She wiggled off back to her pack of friends by the bar. Judging by the sniggering and the disgusted glances he was getting, she wasn’t coming back. Jack sighed and finished off his beer, massaging his forehead. “Yes, brilliant move. You blinded her with science. Genius, Jack.” He ordered a second one and finished it before he felt smallish hands on his shoulders and a pair of soft lips on his cheek. He turned to find Kamala had returned, her smile unnaturally bright in the black lights glowing over the room. “So…how did it go with Kim?” He shot her a flat look. “You notice the chair is empty.” Kamala groaned. “You talked about the research project, didn’t you?” “No!” She glared at him. “…maybe…” “You’re so useless, Jack.” She paused and then tousled his hair a bit. “Cheer up. The night’s still young. I’m not giving up on you.” He smiled in spite of himself. “Yet.” Her brown eyes flashed. “Never.
Kyoko M. (Of Cinder and Bone (Of Cinder and Bone, #1))
The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times. . . . But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature.
Ferdinand Cohn
Instead of focusing upon natural mechanisms that were microscopic and highly complex, Barricelli sought to introduce primitive self-reproducing entities into an empty universe where they could be directly observed. “The Darwinian idea that evolution takes place by random hereditary changes and selection has from the beginning been handicapped by the fact that no proper test had been found to decide whether such evolution was possible and how it would develop under controlled conditions,” he wrote. “A test using living organisms in rapid evolution (viruses or bacteria) would have the serious drawback that the causes of adaptation or evolution would be difficult to state unequivocally, and Lamarckian or other kinds of interpretation would be difficult to exclude.” We now know that lateral gene transfer and other non-neo-Darwinian mechanisms are far more prevalent, especially in microbiology, than was evident in 1953.
George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
Finally, the Industrial Revolution coincided with a transformation of science from a pleasant but nonessential branch of philosophy into a vibrant profession that helped people make money. Many heroes of the early Industrial Revolution were chemists and engineers, often amateurs such as Michael Faraday and James Watt who lacked formal degrees or academic appointments. Like many young Victorians excited by the winds of change, Charles Darwin and his elder brother Erasmus dreamed as boys of becoming chemists.8 Other fields of science, such as biology and medicine, also made profound contributions to the Industrial Revolution, often by promoting public health. Louis Pasteur began his career as a chemist working on the structure of tartaric acid, which was used in wine production. But in the process of studying fermentation he discovered microbes, invented methods to sterilize food, and created the first vaccines. Without Pasteur and other pioneers in microbiology and public health, the Industrial Revolution would not have progressed so far and so fast. In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economic, scientific, and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations—a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time. Over
Daniel E. Lieberman (The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease)
have striking memories of the first microbiology class I took. The instructor asked me and my classmates to place our hands on the agar gel in petri dishes that had been placed on our lab benches. A week later we returned to the lab to find our petri dishes contained gnarly black, yellow, white, and green furry monstrosities growing in the precise shape of our hands. That petri dish was easily the most vivid demonstration of the importance of hand washing I’ve ever seen. We
Jayson Lusk (Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World)
In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history--an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms--gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C.
Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder)
Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :
CK-12 Foundation (CK-12 Life Science for Middle School)
Bacterial vaccines are composed of capsular polysaccharides, inactivated protein exotoxins (toxoids), killed bacteria, or live, attenuated bacteria.
Warren Levinson (Review of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Thirteenth Edition, SMARTBOOK™ (Lange Medical Books))
The usurper was called Strain 121, referring to its facility of growth at 121°C.5 This is a game changer for microbiologists, because 121 degrees is the temperature inside a lab autoclave. Autoclaves sterilize surgical instruments, as well as glassware and growth media for microbiological experiments, by replacing the dry air in their steel chambers with pressurized steam. As far as we know, Strain 121 is unique: every other living thing is defeated by autoclaving.
Nicholas P. Money (The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes)
The average human comprises forty trillion eukaryotic cells and an accompanying microbiome of a hundred trillion bacteria, mostly in the gut, and one quadrillion viruses. We are, in raw cell numbers, more microbe than mammal.
Nicholas P. Money (Microbiology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The prime and ultimate philosophical question has to do with the nature and destiny of man, Camus once wrote. And surely the nature of the embryo/fetus should be at the heart of any serious discussion of the ethic and morality of abortion. Here, not to define is to define; to ignore is to deny. When abortionists ignore the human manifestations of the developing baby, as established by genetics and microbiology, they define him out of the human race.
Paul Marx (The Death Peddlers War on the Unborn)
Scientists working on the origin of life deserve a lot of credit; they have attacked the problem by experiment and calculation, as science should. And although the experiments have not turned out as many hoped, through their efforts we now have a clear idea of the staggering difficulties that would face an origin of life by natural chemical processes. In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life.
Michael J. Behe
a Chinese citizen was fired from a Canadian lab after sending secrets to Wuhan. Here’s how the CBC reported it back then: “A Canadian government scientist at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg made at least five trips to China in 2017-18, including one to train scientists and technicians at China’s newly certified Level 4 lab, which does research with the most deadly pathogens.
Ezra Levant (China Virus: How Justin Trudeau's Pro-Communist Ideology Is Putting Canadians in Danger)
It’s the start of a new era, when people are finally ready to embrace the microbial world. When I walked through San Diego Zoo with Rob Knight at the start of this book, I was struck by how different everything seemed with microbes in mind. Every visitor, keeper, and animal looked like a world on legs – a mobile ecosystem that interacted with others, largely oblivious to their inner multitudes. When I drive through Chicago with Jack Gilbert, I experience the same dizzying shift in perspective. I see the city’s microbial underbelly – the rich seam of life that coats it, and moves through it on gusts of wind and currents of water and mobile bags of flesh. I see friends shaking hands, saying’ “how do you do”, and exchanging living organisms. I see people walking down the street, ejecting clouds of themselves in their wake. I see the decisions through which we have inadvertently shaped the microbial world around us: the choice to build with concrete versus brick, the opening of a window, and the daily schedule to which a janitor now mops the floor. And I see, in the driver’s seat, a guy who notices those rivers of microscopic life and is enthralled rather than repelled by them. He knows that microbes are mostly not to be feared or destroyed, but to be cherished, admired, and studied.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
Reading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically. In the eighteenth century, ships’ captains arriving at port pledged that they had disinfected their ships by swearing on Bibles that had been dipped in seawater. During tuberculosis scares, public libraries fumigated books by sealing them in steel vats filled with formaldehyde gas. These days, you can find out how to disinfect books on a librarians’ thread on Reddit. Your best bet appears to be either denatured-alcohol swipes or kitchen disinfectant in a mist-spray bottle, although if you stick books in a little oven and heat them to a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit there’s a bonus: you also kill bedbugs. (“Doesn’t harm the books!”)
Jill Lepore
mold,
Nina Parker (Microbiology)
(Courtesy of BioVir Laboratories, Inc.) Three years after Koch and Hesse switched to agar-based media, another assistant in the laboratory, Richard J. Petri, designed a shallow glass dish to ease the dispensing of the sterilized molten media. The dishes measured a little less than a half-inch deep and 4 inches in diameter. This Petri dish design has never been improved upon and is a staple of every microbiology lab today. The size
Anne E. Maczulak (Allies and Enemies: How the World Depends on Bacteria (FT Press Science))
Science constantly furnishes us with astonishing ideas about the nature of reality. Physics tells us that there may be an infinite number of universes, of which ours is just one, and that perhaps two particles in no physical contact with one another can somehow influence each other’s properties. From evolutionary biology we learn that birds are the only living descendents of dinosaurs. Geologists reveal that, as a result of the current trajectory of the Earth’s tectonic plates, Australia will eventually collide with Alaska. Contemporary educated people have grown used to the idea that, at least where the causal structure of the world uninfluenced by human agency is concerned, our stock of“commonsense” assumptions and principles is systematically unreliable as a guide to the facts. Our everyday scale of perceptions, along both its temporal and its spatial dimensions, is simply too pinched and unrepresentative to be trusted as a direct window onto wider truths, at least about physics, geology, astronomy, microbiology, and so on.
Don Ross
If I went to a library and lobbed a microbiology textbook out the window, I could easily concuss a passer-by. If I tore out all the pages that dealt with beneficial microbes, I could just about give someone a nasty paper cut. The narrative of disease and death still dominates our view of microbiology.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutchman, was amongst the first to demonstrate their planetary importance. Reclusive, brusque, and unpopular, he had no love for people, except for a few close colleagues, nor any love for medical microbiology. Disease didn't interest him. He wanted to study microbes in their natural habitats: soil, water, plant roots. In 1888, he found bacteria that pulled nitrogen out of the air and turned it into ammonia for plants to use; later, he isolated species that contributed to the movements of sulphur through the soil and atmosphere. This work stimulated a rebirth of microbiology in Beijerinck's city of Delft-where Leeuwenhoek had first laid eyes on bacteria two centuries earlier. The members of this new found Delft school, along with intellectual soulmates like the Russian Sergei Winogradsky, called themselves microbial ecologists. They revealed that microbes were not just threats to humanity but critical components of the world.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world. It is not a flight path, but rather the corridor between bookshelves that unites your country and its language with vast regions that speak other languages. It is not an international frontier you must cross but a footstep--a mere footstep--you must take to change topography, toponyms and time: a volume first published in 1976 sits next to one launched yesterday, which has just arrived; a monograph on prehistoric migrations cohabits with a study of the megalopolis in the twentieth-first century; the complete works of Camus precede those of Cervantes (it is in that unique, reduced space where the line by J.V. Foix rings truest: "The new excites and the old seduces"). It is not a main road, but rather a set of stairs, perhaps a threshold, maybe not even that: turn and it is what links one genre to another, a discipline or obsession to an often complementary opposite; Greek drama to great North American novels, microbiology to photography, Far Eastern history to bestsellers about the Far West, Hindu poetry to chronicles of the Indies, entomology to chaos theory." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History
Jorge Carrión (Bookshops: A Reader's History)
The time period at which these events would take place was between the years 2003 and 2012. Urandir also stated he was told about a microbiological war, either taking place in the future or already underway. When he asked about extraterrestrial intervention, he was told that they have difficulty interacting with us due to the difference in our vibrational frequencies.
Roger K. Leir (UFO Crash in Brazil: A Genuine UFO Crash with Surviving ETs)
The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like an avalanche.
Ben Aaronovitch
the most traumatized are the ones who shape our culture like a microbiologist shapes clay on their lunch break after looking at too many cultures,' the skunk explained.
J.S. Mason (A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites)
Without this [Soil Food Web system of bacteria, fungi etc], most important nutrients would drain from soil. Instead, they are retained in the bodies of soil life. Here is the gardener's truth: when you apply a chemical fertilizer, a tiny bit hits the rhizosphere, where it is absorbed, but most of it continues to drain through soil until it hits the water table. Not so with the nutrients locked up inside soil organisms, a state known as immobilization; these nutrients are eventually released as wastes, or mineralized.
Jeff Lowenfels (Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web)
Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...] Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...] The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...] The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.
Jeff Lowenfels (Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web)
Few realize that a great deal of the energy that results from photosyntheisis in the leaves is actually used by plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. [...] Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates (including sugars) and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and the cellular material sloughed off as the plant's root tips grow. [...] During different times of the growing season, populations of rhizosphere bacteria and fungi wax and wane, depending on the nutrient needs of the plant and the exudates it produces. [...] Plants produce exudates that attract fungi and bacteria (and, ultimately, nematodes and protozoa); their survival depends on the interplay between these microbes. It is a completely natural system, the very same one that has fueled plants since they evolved. Soil life produces the nutrients needed for plant life, and plants initiate and fuel the cycle by producing exudates.
Jeff Lowenfels (Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web)
There's no such thing as good and bad bacteria or fungi. It's not good and bad. It's just whether there's too much of it or too little of it and things are out of balance, so the 'bad things' have an opportunity to prosper.
Nigel Palmer (The Regenerative Grower's Guide to Garden Amendments: Using Locally Sourced Materials to Make Mineral and Biological Extracts and Ferments)
There was a Filipina woman named Gina, who was super cute and a professor of microbiology. Barry had heard of her. She was apparently Layla’s best friend. Her fiancé, Jimmy, was the dean of the engineering school. There was this other guy, Judah, who taught in the Jewish studies program and, incredibly enough, shared Barry’s love of watches. He wore a very under-the-radar vintage Longines with a coveted 13ZN movement, the dial patinated beyond legibility, real Watch Idiot Savant stuff. He had brought two guys from the Jewish studies program faculty with him, both small dudes dressed in overly hot sweaters, whose names Barry kept forgetting. This Judah was as tall as Barry and had some of the same swagger Barry used to have when he was at Princeton, only his came more naturally. He called Barry “a real New York macher,” Yiddish for a guy who gets things done, which totally charmed Barry. His father had used that term with great awe. This guy had friend moves up the ass.
Gary Shteyngart (Lake Success)
I chugged a recovery “Endurance Elixir” that I’d brought—a concoction conceived specifically for me by my friend Compton Rom, a PhD in microbiology who had been using me as a guinea pig to test out various nutritional formulae for his wellness start-up Ascended Health. An entirely plant-based formula loaded with high-caliber nutrients sourced from the four corners of the globe—fermented greens, adaptogens, probiotics, Cordyceps mushroom extracts, marine phytoplankton, and exotic antioxidants, like nattokinase, resveratrol, and quercetin—it’s the furthest thing from flavorful (to say the least) but always revives me like nature’s Red Bull.
Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
Microbiology teaches us that size is no measure of significance; even the smallest microbe can wield immense power. Microbes are the silent warriors; these tiniest beings possess the strength to spark a revolution that can have monumental impacts in the world of science.
Aloo Denish
•​Growth media are used to grow microorganisms in a lab setting. Some media are liquids; others are more solid or gel-like. A growth medium provides nutrients, including water, various salts, a source of carbon (like glucose), and a source of nitrogen and amino acids (like yeast extract) so microorganisms can grow and reproduce. Ingredients in a growth medium can be modified to grow unique types of microorganisms.
Nina Parker (Microbiology)
part together. This struck me as important. But 2 percent is always alive. From a certain microbiological standpoint, trees are immortal. I think history is like this. We cannot capture much more than the trees do of what is living about history. The rest is solid cortex. It stands and is of use to the living part.
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi (Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy)
You are the only woman I have ever known who would figure out how to keep a bunch of starving refugees including herself from going blind and be excited because it means something about microbiology.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))
Microbiology is a journey through the invisible kingdoms, exploring the profound influence of the infinitesimal in shaping the visible world.
Aloo Denish Obiero
Microbiology teaches us that size is no measure of significance; even the smallest microbe can wield immense power. Microbes are the silent warriors; these tiniest beings possess the strength to spark a revolution that can have monumental impacts in the world of science.
Aloo Denish Obiero
Studying microbiology is delving into the vast realm of life's tiniest yet profound influencers—the silent revolutionaries shaping our world.
Aloo Denish Obiero
epidemiology, microbiology and antibiotic utilization. [Updated List of Scientists Dead in Suspicious Circumstances Since Autumn 2001, Global Elite.] On July 18, 2003, it was reported
Robert M. Wood (Alien Viruses: Crashed UFOs, MJ-12, & Biowarfare)
Joe could see that the CDC wasn’t going to solve the problem. But there was a solution: the United States was by far the world’s leader in microbiology research. It contained thousands of microbiology labs, run by private companies and universities and nonprofits, like the one he presided over at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The thing to do, Joe decided, was to transform the Biohub into a COVID-19 testing center as quickly as possible—
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, “You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?” And I answered, “binary fission.” He wanted to know if you could call it “fission” alone, and I said you could.
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
Any subject whose history ranges from pump handles on London's Broad Street, tide tables, naval gunfire and models of social segregation is bound to have rich parentage. It took 'a village' to beget computational epidemiology: as a true multi-disciplinary subject, it evolved at the crossroads of mathematics, computation, statistics and medicine, with some contributions from systems biology, virology, microbiology, game theory, geography and perhaps even the social sciences.
Chris von Csefalvay (Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python)
They" are farmers and ranchers, though generally not those from the front row of the church, that select few who remain in conventional agriculture. These are the ones who were trimmed off long ago, or at least by the industry's prescription, should have been. As we sit and talk, the topics are sometimes technical, often political or economic, and always, ultimately, philosophical. And personal. If we start with a discussion of soil microbiology or a comparison of turkey breeds, inevitably we end up in family, history, ecology, faith, beauty, morality, and the fate of the world to come. For them, all those things are linked. As they see it, agriculture is not an industry on the periphery of modern civilization. It is a fundamental act that determines whether we as a society will live or die. What binds these people is not a particular farming method, but rather the conviction that as humans, the contributions they make are essential. Conventional agriculture doesn't need people for much more than to run the machines and carry the debt, but these people refuse that lifeless role. To the work, they bring their intellects and their consciences, their histories and their concerns for the future. In quiet ways, in quiet places, they have set about correcting the damage that has come from believing agriculture could actually be reduced to numbers alone.
Lisa M. Hamilton (Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness)
the primers chosen dictate the target for amplification, such as rRNA genes or genes that code for proteins with functions of ecological interest, such as those involved in nitrogen fixation (nif), ammonia (amoA) or methane (pmoA) oxidation, or denitrification (narG, napA, nirS, nirK, norB, nosZ). The
Eldor A. Paul (Soil Microbiology, Ecology and Biochemistry)
For DNA to reproduce, it needs to unzip itself down the middle, and the topology of the dna chain dictates which knots are formed afterwards. This is the situation knot theorists are studying as part of modern microbiology research.
Matt Parker
Speaking of which, what counts as dysbiosis? [...] The term is great at conveying the ecological nature of disease but it has also become microbiology's version of art and pornography: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.
Carl Zimmer (A Planet of Viruses)