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WRETCHEDSORCERESS wrote

Arthrospira platensis, commonly known as spirulina, can take on discrete morphologies depending on environmental conditions: helical as the name implies but also linear! theyre shapechanging out here

Aureispira is a predatory bacterium which uses a heptameric "grappling hook" to catch prey and reel itself in then shotgun blast them to death with a type 6 secretion system

Actinosynnema can grow insane branching fractal mycelial hyphae-like synemata structures in agar medium and into the air. they found that guy in New Jersey!

ok those are 3 interesting bacteria whose names start with 'A' that I can think of rn

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rain wrote

ok those are 3 interesting bacteria whose names start with 'A' that I can think of rn

Ok now I’m curious: can you think of any beginning with the letter “q”?

And I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, I love your microbe posts! They are part of what got me posting here :)

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WRETCHEDSORCERESS wrote

Thank you!! That's a good question! There's really not too many Qs, sadly.

There was a 2022 paper proposing three candidate phyla including Qinglongiota. They seem to be a big fan of oxygen poor environments and sediment!

Mesorhizobium qingshengii is a bacteria associated with milkvetch root nodule, which is cool! Those symbiotic relations are awesome. Everyone says its this cool thing plants can do, because our society suffers from serious metazoan bias, but ALL nitrogen fixation [that we know of] comes from bacteria. Some plants just form these symbioses.

Broadly, there's the concept of Quorum Sensing, which is a huge topic but basically accounts for a ton of the cool stuff bacteria do. Basically they can switch up gene expression based on the proportion of various chemicals in the environment. It is insane and awesome.

I was looking up Q related microbes (that sounds like a horrible conspiracy theory thing oops) and was able to find something tangential — queen bees have a really cool microbiome distinct from other bees!

There's also the queen hypotheses. The "Red Queen" one is general biology, basically just claims evolution is an arms race even if one remains static. Black queen is microbe specific and focuses on why certain traits are lost — basically, bacteria are wont to offload labor they don't need to perform. It's adaptive!

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