Any embarrassing moments? Yes. In my first year as an assistant professor I was asked to give a talk in a neighboring department. They had just moved to a new building and I was the first speaker in their new auditorium. As I started my talk, we discovered that the auditorium was so new there weren't any light switches. I couldn't turn off the lights, and my slides were invisible. All those hou...

In cyanobacteria, the CO2-concentrating mechanism (CCM) is a vital biological process that provides effective photosynthetic CO2 fixation by elevating the CO2 level near the active site of Rubisco. This process enables the adaptation of cyanobacteria to various habitats, particularly in CO2-limited environments. Although CCM of freshwater and marine cyanobacteria are well studied, there is limi...

Deformed amphibians have been observed in eutrophic habitats, and some clues point to the retinoic acids (RAs) or RA mimics. However, RAs are generally thought of as vertebrate-specific hormones, and there was no evidence that RAs exist in cyanobacteria or algae blooms. By analyzing RAs and their analogs 4-oxo-RAs in natural cyanobacteria blooms and cultures of cyanobacteria and algae, we showe...

Poisoning of livestock by toxic cyanobacteria was first reported in the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century cyanobacteria-related poisonings of livestock and wildlife in all continents have been described. Some mass mortality events involving unrelated fauna in prehistoric times have also been attributed to cyanotoxin poisoning; if correct, this serves as a reminder that toxic cyanoba...

A controversial precept of aquatic ecology asserts that low ratios of nitrogen to phosphorus (N:P) lead to noxious and sometimes toxic blooms of Cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria dominance is a major risk to human and ecosystem health. The stoichiometric control of Cyanobacteria therefore has become central to freshwater resource management. This controversial concept is based on observed Cyanobacte...

Susan Golden did not set out to become an expert in biological clocks, the internal timepieces that keep life on Earth adjusted to a 24-hour cycle. Instead, Golden, elected in 2010 to the National Academy of Sciences, wanted to identify the genes that underpin photosynthesis. However, her focus changed in 1986 with the discovery of biological clocks in cyanobacteria (1). Because cyanobacteria a...

persist in both freshwater and marine systems. They range from organisms that form red and brown tides to cyanobacteria that turn lakes and ponds green (Figure 1) and red. The toxins (termed “cyanotoxins”) that these organisms produce are usually secondary metabolites, and are more numerically diverse than the organisms that produce them. Here we will focus on the use of molecular methods for d...

N2-fixing proteobacteria (alpha and gamma) and unicellular cyanobacteria are common in both the tropical North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In near-surface waters proteobacterial nifH transcripts were present during both night and day while unicellular cyanobacterial nifH transcripts were present during the nighttime only, suggesting separation of N2 fixation and photosynthesis by unicellular c...

BACKGROUND Pruritic skin rashes associated with exposure to freshwater cyanobacteria are infrequently reported in the medical and scientific literature, mostly as anecdotal and case reports. Diagnostic dermatological investigations in humans are also infrequently described. We sought to conduct a pilot volunteer study to explore the potential for cyanobacteria to elicit hypersensitivity reactio...

The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) ∼2.4 billion years ago resulted from the accumulation of oxygen by the ancestors of cyanobacteria [1-3]. Cyanobacteria continue to play a significant role in primary production [4] and in regulating the global marine and limnic nitrogen cycles [5, 6]. Relatively little is known, however, about the evolutionary history and gene content of primordial cyanobacteria ...