Run and Tumble

In the spirit of the holiday, I present to you a bit of information on members of the informal genus Vampirococcus.

It’s a neat little bug that nestles next to members of Chromatium, forms a cytopathic bridge, and sucks out all their yummy cytoplasm. You generally hear about it as an example epibiont when people discuss bacteria-on-bacteria predation. It also comes up in microbiology classes around this time of year. Otherwise, there’s not a lot to be said about it. I’ll try to fix that.

Let’s say you see Vampirococcus spp. floating towards you, what are you going to do? Would treating it like a regular vampire work?

Regular vampires are known to be averse to garlic, sunlight, decapitation, holy water, silver (at least in recent movies), and, of course, wooden stakes.

Garlic would almost certainly work. It produces a compound called allicin which may be as effective as ciproflaxin(pdf). Just make sure you crush it first; crushing releases the enzyme alliinase which converts the amino acid alliin into allicin. You’ll know when it’s ready because allicin is also what makes garlic smell like, well, garlic.

Recent lore not only says regular vampires hate sunlight, but that it’s the UV which is specifically vampiricidal. This is also true for bacteria. However, they’ve spent a few billion years coming up with ways to cope, and since our bug preys on a photoautotroph, you can bet it knows how to deal with a little sun.

As for decapitation, it’s isn’t a stalked bacteria, so you tell me where the neck is. If you want to get metaphoric, you could go ahead and remove the genetic content. The problem there is that you’re now close enough to the bug for him to be sucking your sweet, sweet cytoplasm.

Holy water might work. If you think of ‘holy’ as ‘pure’, you might be able to get some sort of osmotic lysis going on. More interesting is that the thing people sprinkle holy water with is called an aspergillium. The resemblance of some fungi to a liturgical super soaker is why their genus is named Aspergillus. And, interestingly enough, at least one species, Aspergillus clavatus produces an antibiotic. I’m not saying beating a bacteria with an aspergillium is going to work, but if you’ve got no other options, give it a whack.

Silver is actually pretty well known to kill bugs. Back before we had antibiotics, we used to drip silver nitrate solution into the eyes of newborn babies so they didn’t get ocular gonorrhea. Go ahead and pelt Vampirococcus with the good gravy boat.

Wooden stake lore is fascinating. Did you know that some legends are specific about what kind of wood you have to use? The most common suggestions are oak, ash, woodruff, and rose. Each of these have at least one species, local to the area which prefers it for slaying, whose essential oil exhibits bactericidal effects. The big problem is that most of the oils are extracted from leaves and berries, not good stake making material. Your best bet is to either go with ash, whose oils are in the bark(go for that rustic look), or oak, which is riddled with endophytic fungi that produce antibiotics.

On a serious note, I found out Vampirococcus didn’t have a Wikipedia page, so I actually had the pleasure of starting a new one and watching as people helped improve it. If you know me personally, you know how much I love Wikipedia and can guess how jazzed I am to have been able to contribute to it.

Happy Halloween!

(Artist’s interpretation of Vampirococcus modified from this vampire image)