Word: bacterias
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According to Patrick M. Gillevet, director and chief scientist of the Harvard Genome Laboratory, Gilbert's project was to develop a direct sequencing method, using bacteria as models...
...culprit, test results show, is a tiny parasite with a big name: cryptosporidium. The oocysts (parasite versions of eggs) of this pesky protozoan can be removed only through filtration. Unlike bacteria, they are not readily killed by chlorine. Furthermore, the tests that water-purification plants routinely rely on to detect biological contaminants do not pick up the presence of cryptosporidium. What makes the parasite especially nasty, explains microbiologist Dean Cliver of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is that the oocysts do not hatch in water -- in this case Lake Michigan water -- but remain dormant until they are swallowed by some...
...MOST BACTERIA HAVE THE DECENCY TO BE MICROscopic. Epulopiscium fishelsoni is not among them. The newly identified one-celled macro-microorganism, which lives harmlessly in the intestine of the Red Sea-dwelling brown surgeonfish, is a full fiftieth of an inch long, large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Described in the current Nature, it is a million times as massive as the bacteria that inhabit the human...
Epulopiscium is notable for sheer grotesqueness, of course, but it also upsets some long-held scientific assumptions. For one, biologists had believed that bacteria could never be very large because, unlike one-celled animals (such as amoebas), they don't have the internal machinery to spread nutrients through their bodies. Now it appears that some fossilized traces of large microorganisms, which researchers presumed to be from animals, may have come from bacteria instead. If that's true, scientists know less than they thought about the early history of life on earth...
...pinpoint the source of the bacteria, the victim's DNA will be sequenced at Louisiana State University, and researchers will attempt to correlate the locations of victims...