Episode Details

Matters Microbial #115: Suiting Up Against Bacterial Predators! November 6, 2025

Today Dr. Hannah Ledvina, Assistant Professor in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department at the University of Michigan joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss how bacteria can protect themselves against predators in unusual ways . . . including a type of armor!

Host: Mark O. Martin

Guest: Hannah Ledvina

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Links for this episode

• The "Giant Microbes" website.
• A prompt for my course: an article on "Animals in a Microbial World," with so many interesting examples. Here is a summary for novice #Micronauts.
• A prompt for my course: an article by the late, great Lynn Margulis on the nature of kefir grains and the definition of multicellularity and the organism.
• A prompt for my course: an article on hyperpolyploidy in bacteria.
• An explanation of "genomic islands."
• A link to a previous guest of #MattersMicrobial, Dr. Laura Williams, discussing Bdellovibrio and undergraduate based research.
• An overview of predatory bacteria. Here is a more recent overview.
• An overview of the predator Myxococcus.
• A wonderful video showing the predatory process of Myxococcus.
• A fine review of the predator Bdellovibrio.
• A video of the life cycle of Bdellovibrio.
• Some work by Dr. Koval and colleagues suggesting that aspects of the outer cell wall is not involved with resistance to Bdellovibrio.
• Recent VERY exciting work suggesting that there is indeed a receptor on bacteria that Bdellovibrio can recognize. Here is a short summary of that work.
• Could Bdellovibrio become a "living antibiotic"?
• A reminder from Drs. Kolter and Losick that bacteria in the laboratory can be quite different from their relatives in nature.
• The article under discussion on this podcast by Dr. Ledvina and colleagues. Here is an e