Word: bacterium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...damnable stuffiness; Mr. Clark copes somewhat better with Algy, but cannot quite hit off his incorrigibly cheeky lightmindedness. As a result, they appear as a set of almost interchangeably cheerful young men. Gretchen Kanne misses the hothouse bloom of Gwendolyn, who exists in and through Society like an elegant bacterium in its nutrient broth. (In the midst of an ineffably decorous cat-fight, Gwendolyn accepts a cup of tea from her rival with the aside, "Detestable girl! But I require tea!") (italics mine...
Even more important was Lederberg's later discovery that viruses preying on bacteria can change the heredity of their victims. In this process, which is called transduction, a virus invades a bacterium, breaks it up and reorganizes its material into hundreds of new virus particles. If these particles in turn infect another bacterium and it survives, they sometimes change it into a new strain. Apparently the viruses, acting somewhat like submicroscopic spermatozoa, take hereditary material from the first bacterium and transfer it to the second...
...Carolina farmers complained that their corn had a mysterious disease. It looked as if it were dying of drought, but when rain fell, the corn did not recover. The disease spread, and last year sample plants were sent to North Carolina State College, where plant pathologists could find no bacterium, virus, fungus or other malefactor to account for the trouble. Then a graduate student from India took a careful look at the sick corn and recognized among its roots the underground stems of witchweed, which had never before invaded the Western Hemisphere...
...Moldenkes' new book, Plants of the Bible (Chronica Botanica Co.; $7.50), tries to identify every plant mentioned in the Bible, even to the humble bacterium (Pasteurella pestis) that smote the Israelites with emerods. The job is a tough one, for neither the early writers nor the later translators of the Bible were botanists. They often used the same word for different plants, and different words for the same plant. The botanically innocent scholars who produced the King James Version turned aspens into mulberries and dill into anise. The sycomore that Zacchaeus climbed to catch a glimpse of Jesus...
Another way to block the cytochrome is to use purified diphtheria toxin. Diphtheria toxin is a protein excreted by diphtheria bacilli, and is a part of the bacterium's cytochrome b, which in turn is an enzyme in that bacterium's cytochrome system...