What does the title of this blog mean?

A couple of people have asked me “what does the title of your blog actually mean?” Let me try and answer that.

Over the course of 3.5 billion years or so of evolution bacteria have adapted to survive and flourish in essentially every ecological niche on the planet. One of the main research interests of my group is understanding at a genomic and genetic level how particular bacteria have adapted to their environment. In essence, what are the lifestyle choices of bacteria?

The word “lifestyle” appears to be making repeated appearances in our grant applications. One of our current ARC Discovery projects (DP110102718) is called “Lifestyle choices: genomic analysis of niche adaptations in marine Synechococcus”. The NHMRC grant that Karl and I just wrote is titled “Tolerating a stressful lifestyle: drug resistance in the nosocomial pathogen A. baumannii”. 

Over time hopefully this blog will look into some of the microbial lifestyles our research group is investigating.

Not my lifestyle choice, but these guys like it. Microbial slimes in limestone caves beneath the Nullabor Plain (photo coutesy of Peter Rogers)