ABOVE: © THOM GRAVES
The cultures reminded him of Swiss cheese, says Egbert Hoiczyk. It was 2009 and the microbiologist and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University were growing the motile bacterium Myxococcus xanthus on agar plates. “What we observed was something quite bizarre,” recalls Hoiczyk, now at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
Bacteria had grown out in a yellowish smear coating the plates, but then holes appeared in the microbial film. The empty spaces looked like plaques created by bacteria-killing viruses, so Hoiczyk’s team concluded there must be a viral invader in their cultures. When the researchers scraped the cleared areas and examined the material under an electron microscope, they observed 32-nanometer-wide structures resembling 12-sided dice—the right size and shape for a bacteriophage.
It’s becoming accepted, a lot, in the last 10 or 20 years that the prokaryotic cytoplasm is highly organized.
Hoiczyk, undergraduate Alan Lam, and ...
