Collaborating Physicists and Microbiologists Seek Common Lingo

Constraint Lingo

Microarrays for microbiologists.

We are witnessing a remarkable change in the scale of molecular microbiological research and we are entering an era of ‘big science’. In the past decade we have moved from a time when entire research papers were based on the sequencing of a single gene or operon to a single paper describing the sequence of a whole genome. The completion of microbial genomes is continuing apace, with 37 genome s...

Glycomics for Microbes and Microbiologists

The recent article "Lectin-Glycan Interaction Network-Based Identification of Host Receptors of Microbial Pathogenic Adhesins" by Ielasi et al. describes a new development in microbial carbohydrate analysis [Ielasi FS, Alioscha-Perez M, Donohue D, Claes S, Sahli H, Schols D, Willaert RG, mBio 7(4):e00584-16, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00584-16]. Specific carbohydrate ligands have been...

Bayesians, Frequentists, and Physicists

PHYSTAT2003 brought statisticians together with particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. This paper, which is taken from the text of the keynote address, concerns the uneasy relationship between Bayesian and frequentist statistics, with particular attention to the “neutrino problem”: how to set confidence limits for a parameter known to be non-negative. Model selection, an object...

Databases for Microbiologists

Databases play an increasingly important role in biology. They archive, store, maintain, and share information on genes, genomes, expression data, protein sequences and structures, metabolites and reactions, interactions, and pathways. All these data are critically important to microbiologists. Furthermore, microbiology has its own databases that deal with model microorganisms, microbial divers...