#plasmids

Weretober 2025: Shark

The plasmids from my favorite video game series Bioshock!

Hope you like it!

Download HERE

Magic Box

There's MAGIC (MultiSite Assembly of Gateway Induced Clones) to be found inside a new genetic engineering toolkit: it's a collection of DNA fragments known as plasmids, for manipulating (including by chemical or optical means) gene expression in living animals (applicable in birds, fish and mammals) and in cells in the lab. Here, the MAGIC system highlights a cell's inner scaffold or cytoskeleton of actin filaments

Image made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Read the published research article here

Image from work by William B. Gillespie and colleagues

Department of Cell Biology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Development, November 2025

New on my Redbubble!! I’ve been playing Bioshock again, so I made this art deco sign for Rapture.

Genes responsible for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) can spread from microbe to microbe through circular genetic material called plasmids, and this lateral transfer occurs in the gut. In Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers in Iowa report that the transmission of some AMR plasmids may be inhibited by a readily available source—dietary zinc supplements. "This is the first time where we've discovered that zinc inhibits the process of plasmid transfer, and at lower concentrations it has minimal effect on bacteria," said microbiologist and senior author on the study Melha Mellata, Ph.D., at Iowa State University.