#cyanobacteria

[lichenaday]

What is a "semilichen"?

Me: *sighs* this is some Jan Vondrák nonsense, isn't it? *Googles* yep, called it.

Ok ok, It's not really nonsense, it's just that Jan has a tendency to publish papers that make my life more complicated as a lichenologist than it already is. He loves breaking the field and introducing new concepts and terms and questions to be asked. He's a really cool, really smart, really nice guy who knows his shit, but he's become a bit of an inside joke in our lab group, to the point that when stuff gets complicated we yell "JAAAAN!!!" in the style of "KAHHHHN!" from Star Trek.

Anyhow, a semilichen (or an alcobiosis as it is sometimes called), is a community of fungi and photosynthesizing organisms like green algae or cyanobacteria that grow together and seem to have some sort of symbiotic association, but are not as like, close? or closed? as a true lichen symbiosis. It is something that falls juuuust short of being a lichen by being less structured and less like, obvious. Usually, it looks like a sort of undifferentiated slime. So where is the line between semilichen and lichen? A lichen has a thallus--a "body" which has specialized structures made up of more-or-less organized fungal hyphae and photobiont cells. Semilichens are more of a general mixture of fungi and photobiont cells without structure or organization. A lichen is a casserole, and a semilichen is a soup. It's not a perfect metaphor but its all I got.

This is all still new, emerging science mostly being done by a small group of researchers, but it is all very exciting and I hope we can watch the development of this field in real time!

Semilichen, an unjustly neglected symbiotic system between green biofilms and true lichens

Alcobiosis, an algal-fungal association on the threshold of lichenisation

[organical-mechanical]

Iron probably didn’t rust much before Cyanobacteria.

Copper never turned green

Think about that…

Then the Cyanobacteria came in, and all the iron that surfaced during varying periods of time all rusted at once

[ieafy]

Microworld. This is a preview of this month's patreon phone wallpaper!! 🦠

I think this one's my favourite one so far and it's going on my own phone hehe ☺️

I've been learning about microorganisms for two days now and have grown deeply fascinated since wondering what the algae that my pink ramshorn snails eating, actually is 🐌

[wild-e-eep]

A very splendid Ricasolia virens lichen with a black, bushy thallus containing cyanobacteria and a scattering of bright green lobes with algae instead.

[eternalcomx]

It's crazy to think that going to a beach on a nice sunny day on earth looked like this 2.8 billion years ago.

The orange sky is not a sunset. There's little to no oxygen in the air so the ozone layer didn't exist yet.

The only life that existed was bacteria and archaea in a green ocean.

[unbfacts]

About 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen-making bacteria changed Earth forever. Their oxygen poisoned many early microbes and helped destroy methane, a warming gas. That may have helped trigger long Snowball-Earth-like ice ages that lasted, with warmer breaks, around 300 million years.

[neat-deadandlive-things]

TEAM DESMODESMUS

[mindblowingscience]

Cyanobacteria can utilize toxic guanidine as a nitrogen source

Guanidine is an organic compound primarily used as a denaturing reagent to disrupt the structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Together wi

Guanidine is an organic compound primarily used as a denaturing reagent to disrupt the structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Together with partner institutions, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have demonstrated that cyanobacteria, which play a central role in global biogeochemical cycles, use guanidine as a nitrogen source. The results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers shed light on the underlying mechanisms and the potential for a new tool for sustainable biotechnological applications.

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