Organizing the second PVC conference

Just to tell you quickly that we started organizing the second conference entirely dedicated to PVC bacteria research.

It will be held from the 2nd to the 4th of June 2015 in Carmona , a very lovely town close to Sevilla, Andalucia, Spain.

The first PVC conference was already successful and we are all looking forward to the second one.

So please start saving the dates. More information soon.

Peptidoglycan in Chlamydia

Related to the discussion about the exceptional status of the PVC cell plan to which we dedicated two recent posts, on the TiM and AvL articles by Devos, and the latest by Fuerst's team, is a new article reporting detection of peptidoglycan in Chlamydia. Liechti et al. describe in Nature a new cell-wall labelling method that finally settles the 50 years old debate concerning the chlamydial anomaly. important question not answered by this manuscript is where is the PG located in Chlamydia? Is it in between the two membranes, where Devos suggests it should be, or is it found outside the outermost membrane, where Fuerst would have it? Although not directly addressed by the authors, it seems pretty clear that the green signal, marking the OM ring is located outside of the red signal, marking the PG (see Fig. 2 or supplementary figure 5). Thus, it seems that PG is located internal to the OM, supporting a more classical G- interpretation of the cell plan, at least in Chlamydia.

Improve your figure

Nice little paper in the '10 simple rules' collection of PLoS Comp. Bio. about drawing better figures.
We could all get something out of this paper. It also contain good references about how to make them colorblind friendly
Like most of the paper in the 10SR series, nice, short and useful.