T. rex "tissue" may just be bacterial scum

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 3 weeks (www.newscientist.com)

When palaeontologists reported that they had recovered soft tissue from a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, the excitement was palpable.

Without going all Jurassic Park, the discovery seemed to open the door to studying biomolecules from dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures.

It seems, however, that no one will be cooking up a new zoo exhibit from this one. The "tissue" appears to have been layers of biofilms laid down by bacteria and not the skin and flesh of the ancient beastie

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Bacterial locomotion revealed! ...and stoppable!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 5 months 1 day (www.nature.com)

Bacteria have two forms, free-swimming and sessile. It is during this stationary biofilm stage that they cause the most trouble, building up on scientific and medical equipment and forming huge, multi-species colonies or worse--building up in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis. We've known for years that bacteria have to shut down their flagella to form biofilms, but now we have an idea of how it's done. The gene in question is called epsE

The article describes the molecular motor function as more of a clutch than a brake, but we didn't have auto shop at my high school

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MIT, BU team builds viruses to combat harmful 'biofilms'

bianjie submitted, created time 1 year 4 months (web.mit.edu)

In one of the first potential applications of synthetic biology, an emerging field that aims to design and build useful biomolecular systems, researchers from MIT and Boston University are engineering viruses to attack and destroy the surface "biofilms" that harbor harmful bacteria in the body and on industrial and medical devices.

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