Thursday, June 05, 2008

Cuddle up to a phage!

While searching Amazon for a book, I came across a very funny (in a geeky way) line of plush toys: all sorts of microbes! GiantMicrobes.com has quite a taxonomy of them. I think my visual favorite is the T4 phage , but there's lots of other fun stuff here.

You can get a whole range of common (E.coli) and nasty (a whole line of venereal disease agents. Human pathogens are not monopolized: to terrorize Miss Amanda (or make voodoo chew toys) there's mange, rabies & heartworm.

The E.coli are a flagellated strain. You can buy one or a trio (Petri dish) . Surprisingly, there isn't a package deal on T4+E.coli, nor do they (yet?) have a pBR322 to accessorize your E.coli. Perhaps a future product line extension will include GFP-expressing glow-in-the-dark variants, or perhaps some scent-enhanced ones.

1 comment:

Tim Sampson said...

The T4 is perhaps the best giant microbe of them all! Although the MRSA and Polio virus are a close second.

Tim

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Tim Sampson
www.phagehunter.org