Microbiology: Phenylalanine Deaminase Test

After completing a fairly extensive survey of bacterial and viral pathogens, it's time to learn about some other more general microbiology concepts. What better place to start than the indispensable tool of the microbiologist, the...

The Microbe That's Big Enough to Pet

Lectin Pathway of Complement Activation

Suctorians The Ugly Duckling of Ciliates

Lacrymaria: Vicious Long-Necked Predators

We Recorded Too Much Slow Motion Footage So Here's a Bonus Video

What Is the Point of Sex

Join us on the first episode of Journey to the Microcosmos as we take a dive into the tiny, unseen world that surrounds us! With music by Andrew Huang, footage from James Weiss, and narration by Hank Green, we hope to take you on a...

It may not be the super rare tentacled ciliate we were looking for, but it's still a really cool super rare tentacled ciliate!

When James first saw these bacteria, all he knew is that they came from a sample taken from a Portuguese beach. And on the slide, the bacteria were swimming in a stark line. And that gave James an idea. He took out his phone and opened...

Even in the microcosmos, it's important to stay inside if you want to avoid a virus.

Everybody poops, but how does one poop when one does not have a butthole?

Death is inevitable and mysterious, even in the microcosmos. Stentors, heliozoans, and yes, even tardigrades, experience death in many different ways.

Here we look at the reaction and results of the Starch Hydrolysis Test in Microbiology Lab.<br/>

This is a world where microbes are both residents and food, which means that occasionally, we’ll have to spend our time together watching organisms, whose bodies are fractions upon fractions upon fractions of a millimeter in size, turn...

The family Spathidiidae is made up of around 20 genera, which encompass around 250 known species. And there’s a lot of variety in the Spathidiid family to sort through.

This week, we're diving back into the world of Stentors to find out what humans and Stentors have in common!<br/>

It's time to meet a single-celled organism that is bigger than a tardigrade! We'll learn how Stentors reproduce, why they look like trumpets, and why some of them are just SO BLUE!

We’re starting this episode out with a question that we’re never going to have a good answer for: how many cells do animals have? How could we ever hope to count all those cells in each of those animals? And how could we even begin to...

The goal of phylogenetic trees is to track the organisms we know of through their place in evolution.

In this video, we will discuss the theory and results of the coagulase test (in tubes and on slides).<br/>

Somewhere around 470 million years ago, something happened that shouldn’t have been particularly striking. An algae found its way onto land. This algae turned the lands of this earth green, altered the chemistry of our atmosphere, and...

To study organisms at the genetic level, we need their DNA. Which means that we need to be able to wade through all the bits and pieces lying within their tiny bodies to pick out something even tinier—something we can’t just dig out with...