The vital details

A CV from 1881, written in German. The source and English translation are here. It's concise.

I saw a CV yesterday that made me think about the purpose of having a Curriculum Vitae to begin with. This CV was by an established academic with a career of several decades at American universities. It included the usual information: work history, publications, awards, classes taught, and so on. The heading included his birthplace, marital status, and number of children. This last bit of data didn't raise any red flags for me but I don't think it's common practice in the US. Europe is a different story.

This is a dry subject. It's tax-form-typography, accounting-spreadsheet-debugging dull. I won't make any apologies for it. When the bulk of our interactions with society take the form of visits to social network profiles, though, it's helpful to remember the CV (or résumé) as the canonical form of self-description. It doesn't describe who you are as a human but it lists what you've done and alludes to what you could do next, given the right opportunity.  Any modern social network serves much the same function in a smaller capacity.

So, let's assume you're searching for a job. You've submitted your CV to some people who may want to know more about you. Let's assume these people aren't myopic enough to search out your most unflattering Facebook photos but they'll certainly scratch the easily-Googleable surface.  Should your CV already include the most obvious information? I've heard suggestions about how providing family background serves as an employer filter - those who actively discriminate against married candidates may not be conducive to family life - but some personal data isn't as simple as "married, two kids, born in Seattle".

I'm in favor of having personal data emerge organically. It's preferable to the alternatives. As some fields get more competitive, though, I won't be surprised to see usual hiring processes get more data-intensive.

This Today Show report found BACTERIA on a cruise ship! Imagine that! Quote:

Not only that: When the sample from the serving spoon was sent to a certified lab, total coliform was found on it. "It's very bad," Glatter said of the finding. "These are bacteria that live in our gut, in our GI tract, and they make you really sick."

Wait, this isn't an April Fool's gag? It's yet another genuinely bad bacteria scare story in a long line of bad science journalism by popular morning shows? Show me another internet gag, Internet.

Heavy lifting

Could a bacteriophage package an entire host genome by generalized transduction?

It's not impossible. Generalized transduction isn't part of the usual phage life cycle but it's one of the ways phage can mediate horizontal gene transfer. There's a limit on how much genetic material transduction can transfer as the phage capsid is only so large. That being said, some phages carry rather large genomes. The bacillus phage G genome is one of those hefty ones at nearly 500 kb and almost 700 open reading frames. It was found in Bacillus megaterium. Depending upon the strain, a B. megaterium genome is between 5.1 and 5.7 Mb, or at least ten times the size of the phage G genome. 

That being said, the Mycoplasma genitalium genome is only around 580 kb. I don't know if any phages are known to infect it but one as large as bacillus phage G could hypothetically package a nearly complete M. genitalium genome. If we consider endosymbionts like Carsonella ruddii or Nasuia deltocephalinicola in this scenario then their < 200 kb genomes would even fit into smaller viral capsids. How would the phages enter a symbiont-containing host in the first place?

I suspect that this phenomenon is much more likely to occur in a lab than in the wild but phages have a way of subverting our expectations.

I listened to this Radio Diaries podcast this morning. It's about the time a plane crashed into the Empire State Building, how an incidental audio recording of the crash was made, and how it led to someone setting a new world record. The whole story is an interesting bit of history, not only because of the obvious 9/11 comparisons, but because there's actually an audio record of it. We tend to take that for granted in a world where every event could become an animated GIF.

I always enjoy the Talmudic Questions at Small Things Considered and the most recent two questions have been especially interesting:

1. Are there bacteriophages known to infect eukaryotic cells?

2. Are there any phages known to attack mitochondria or chloroplasts?

The responses are thought-provoking as well.