Microbial Genomics and the Periodic Table

Microbial genomics and the periodic table.

Extensive knowledge of microbial metabolism has been earned through more than a century of reductionist study. There is now basic understanding of how cultivated bacteria transduce the chemical energy of a growth substrate into the work and biosynthetic processes that underlie both survival and replication. This includes an appreciation that microorganisms can metabolize many chemical substance...

The Periodic Electronegativity Table

The origins and development of the electronegativity concept as an empirical construct are briefly examined, emphasizing the confusion that exists over the appropriate units in which to express this quantity. It is shown how to relate the most reliable of the empirical scales to the theoretical definition of electronegativity in terms of the quantum potential and ionization radius of the atomic...

Microbial Genomics

It is well known that the gut microbiota regulates homeostasis of the digestive system; however, the mechanisms involved have been difficult to uncover. By manipulating the germ environment of Drosophila alongside genomic analyses of its symbiont, Acetobacter pomorum, Shin et al. (2011) deduce a pathway that relies on the collaboration between a bacterial enzymatic reaction and the host insulin...

From the Mendeleev periodic table to particle physics and back to the periodic table

We briefly describe in this paper the passage from Mendeleev’s chemistry (1869) to atomic physics (in the 1900’s), nuclear physics (in the 1932’s) and particle physics (from 1953 to 2006). We show how the consideration of symmetries, largely used in physics since the end of the 1920’s, gave rise to a new format of the periodic table in the 1970’s. More specifically, this paper is concerned with...

Cracks in the periodic table.