MicrobeWorld

What looks like a Native American dream catcher is really a network of social interactions within a community. The red dots along the inner and outer circles represent people, while the different colored lines represent direct contact between them. All connections originate from four individuals... Read More

Circular, smooth, entire, opaque colonies of Proteus vulgaris on a nutrient agar plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

A spore from the bacterium Bacillus subtilis shows four outer layers that protect the cell from harsh environmental conditions.

Bacillus subtilis is a ubiquitous bacterium commonly recovered from water, soil, air, and decomposing plant residue. The bacterium produces an endospore that allows... Read More

Under the microscope, an E. coli cell lights up like a fireball. Each bright dot marks a surface protein that tells the bacteria to move toward or away from nearby food and toxins. Using a new imaging technique, researchers can map the proteins one at a time and combine them into a single image.... Read More

This montage of tiny, transparent C. elegans—or roundworms—may offer insight into understanding human infertility. Researchers used fluorescent dyes to label the worm cells and watch the process of sex-cell division, called meiosis, unfold as nuclei (blue) move through the tube-like gonads. Such... Read More

The tiny water bacterium Caulobacter crescentus secretes a sugary substance so sticky that just a tiny bit could hold several cars together. First, it attaches to a surface at the end of its cell body, which has a propeller-like flagellum. On contact, the flagellum stops moving with help from ne... Read More

This colorized negative stained transmission electron micrograph (TEM), captured by F.A. Murphy in 1968, depicts a Marburg virus virion, which had been grown in an environment of tissue culture cells. Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a rare, severe type of hemorrhagic fever which affects both humans... Read More

This photograph depicts the colonial growth pattern displayed by Salmonella typhimurium bacteria cultured on a Hektoen enteric (HE) agar medium; S. typhimurium colonies grown on HE agar are blue-green in color, for this organism is a lactose non-fermenter, but it does produce hydrogen sulfide, (... Read More

Circular, smooth, entire, opaque colonies of Alcaligenes on a nutrient agar plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

Like a major city, our cells use a complex transportation network to deliver molecular goods to different destinations. A protein called kinesin (blue) is in charge of moving cargo around inside cells and helping them divide. It's powered by biological fuel called ATP (bright yellow) as it scoot... Read More

Pigmented and non-pigmented parts of Serratia marcescens colonies. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

Fernan Federici, a researcher in the Haseloff Lab at Cambridge University and one of the Synthetic Aesthetics residents, studies how cells grow and develop into complex shapes and structures. Using confocal microscopy, he tracks the growth of plant cells and tissues, creating models of how cell ... Read More

In this Envisat image, a phytoplankton bloom swirls a figure-of-8 in the South Atlantic Ocean about 600 km east of the Falkland Islands.

During this period in the southern hemisphere, the ocean becomes rich in minerals from the mixing of surface waters with deeper waters. Phytoplankton depen... Read More

Scanning Electron Micrograph of Burkholderia cepacia.

Burkholderia cepacia is the name for a group or “complex” of bacteria that can be found in soil and water. B. cepacia bacteria are often resistant to common antibiotics.

B. cepacia poses little medical risk to healthy people. However,... Read More

Circular, opaque colonies on the surface of a nutrient agar plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

Irregular, concentric, undulate, opaque colonies on the surface of a nutrient agar plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

The appearance of circular, entire, opaque colonies on the surface of a nutrient agar plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

Under a high magnification of 21930x, this scanning electron micrograph (SEM) depicted some of the ultrastructural morphologic features displayed by this group of Gram-positive Micrococcus luteus bacteria. The specimen was obtained from a pure culture that was raised on a polycarbonate filter, f... Read More

A contaminant (mold mycelium) on a Serratia streak plate. Taken from the Wistreich Collection, appearing exclusively on MicrobeWorld. Read More

Virus-bacterium associations were examined in the natural environment of a termite's hindgut. Three general scenarios were seen. In the first (1) there was a one-to-one association: one type of virus matched one type of bacterium host. In the second (2) the host bacterium was associated wi... Read More