In a vain attempt to inject some science into this blog, I thought I might consider some popular "facts" about bacteria which appear in some science textbooks and are thus perpetuated as urban myths within the scientific community. The most popular one, which I'll start with is:
Bacteria have a singular, circular chromosome
Many bacteria, including the "model" bacterium Escherichia coli, that do have only one chromosome. However, there are numerically more bacteria in the world that have not one, or two, but many chromosomes. For example, Rhodobacter sphaeroides has two circular chromosomes, and Paracoccus pantotrophus has at least 4, one of which is linear. The possession of a linear chromosome isn't unusual. One of the most important organisms in biotechnology, Streptomyces coelicolor, has a single linear chromosome too.
Monday 1 October 2007
Term has well and truly started
The term at Oxford Brookes has started, and I have a flock of M.Sc. Biotechnology students to tend to. I thought the type of student might be different from the M.Sc. Microbiology course I helped run at Birkbeck, University of London. However, we have the same sort of mix of students.
The beginning of the university term also means that for me, its the end of the time trialling season, which has been quite successful on the whole. I was pleased that I managed to get my name in the local paper most weeks, with consistent top-ten placings throughout the year meaning that I can look forward to receiving one or two prizes at the club dinner. However, my highlight of the year was going "under the hour" during an open time trial two weekends ago. The quest to cycle at 25 miles an hour for one hour is delightfully pointless, and if you are going to do it, why not cycle 25 miles in 58 minutes and 14 seconds? Thanks to Hounslow & District Wheelers for organising the event, but could they please send out the results sheets soon?
More ground-breaking news is that the book I co-authored last year (Instant Notes in Microbiology) is now number 99,357 in the amazon.co.uk bestseller list, and 1,652,746th in the equivalent amazon.com list. Surely I can expect the offers of interviews on daytime TV to start flooding in? The pleasing thing is that on the whole the book has been well-received, with quite a few positive reviews in journals as well as on Amazon. The one fly in the ointment is that one reader felt that this was more of a GCSE book than a university-level one. This disturbs me a little as my part of the book was based on a series of lectures I gave to postgraduate students. Which sort of brings me around, circularly, to the subject of the first paragraph of this post...
The beginning of the university term also means that for me, its the end of the time trialling season, which has been quite successful on the whole. I was pleased that I managed to get my name in the local paper most weeks, with consistent top-ten placings throughout the year meaning that I can look forward to receiving one or two prizes at the club dinner. However, my highlight of the year was going "under the hour" during an open time trial two weekends ago. The quest to cycle at 25 miles an hour for one hour is delightfully pointless, and if you are going to do it, why not cycle 25 miles in 58 minutes and 14 seconds? Thanks to Hounslow & District Wheelers for organising the event, but could they please send out the results sheets soon?
More ground-breaking news is that the book I co-authored last year (Instant Notes in Microbiology) is now number 99,357 in the amazon.co.uk bestseller list, and 1,652,746th in the equivalent amazon.com list. Surely I can expect the offers of interviews on daytime TV to start flooding in? The pleasing thing is that on the whole the book has been well-received, with quite a few positive reviews in journals as well as on Amazon. The one fly in the ointment is that one reader felt that this was more of a GCSE book than a university-level one. This disturbs me a little as my part of the book was based on a series of lectures I gave to postgraduate students. Which sort of brings me around, circularly, to the subject of the first paragraph of this post...
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