Microbial Diversity

What should a scientist look like? A pair of articles was published this morning in our local paper ( the Herald Times ).  In it are details of the many inequities faced by female scientists at Indiana University.  In those articles, some startling statistics were published, including the percentage of female faculty in the sciences at IU (~10%) and directly relevant to me, the inequity in salary (in Biology, the seven female full professors make ~$131,000 while the 22 male full professors make ~161,000).  In addition, there were some poignant anecdotes from female professors: "I never had children" said one, "I or my partner. We never had time we could take out of our careers without feeling like we might lose what we had gained."   It's nigh time to address the root of this insidious problem.  It cannot be fixed by hiring more women -- there are few of us to begin with and additionally, we all agree we want to hire both the  best and most  diverse...

An intriguing title for an article published in PLoS Pathogens on Halloween.  Needless to say, many of us in the Wolbachia community anxiously await the discovery of the mechanism behind Cytoplasmic Incompatibility.  For those of you who aren't Wolbachia -philes, the short of it is that this bacterium has figured out a nifty way to spread through insect populations. First, it's transmitted via the germ line -- so that means eggs come pre-loaded with Wolbachia from infected mothers.  Second, Wolbachia affect reproduction in a variety of ways but the most common is that infected females can mate with uninfected or infected males.  However, if you are an uninfected female -- if you don't carry the bacterium -- you cannot mate with infected males.  This drops the fecundity of uninfected females and allows Wolbachia , and the host carrying it, to spread.  There are also some interesting incompatibilities that result when hosts are infected with two diff...