Quotes About Bacteria

If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance. What you are left with after a course of antibiotics, after all, are the most resistant microbes. By attacking a broad spectrum of bacteria, you stimulate lots of defensive action. At the same time, you inflict unnecessary collateral damage. Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost.

84 percent of chicken breasts, nearly 70 percent of ground beef, and getting on for half of pork chops contained intestinal E. coli, which is not good news for anything but the coli. *1

Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria. About one person in every sixteen in the developed world will suffer appendicitis at some point, enough to make it the most common cause of emergency surgery. Without surgery, many appendicitis victims would die.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, Dude, do not mess with Lysol?

Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.

Prebiotic supplements are a form of fiber supplement—specifically, a soluble fiber—that has been shown to support the growth of beneficial bacteria.

Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.

I've been collecting articles on extremophile bacteria for at least the last ten years. I find them fascinating, whether they live in boiling pools at Yellowstone, around thermal vents at the floors of the oceans, or on Mars, where NASA has been searching for them as the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.

One bit of advice someone gave me - which I haven't yet tried - is that if you go to an area where you might pick up a tummy bug, you should seek out the local probiotic yogurt. Eating it will introduce you to the local gut flora, apparently.

The way yogurt works is you take the old yogurt culture and you put it in milk. You have to put enough of the old culture in, and then that old culture will convert the milk into yogurt.

Better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent E. coli 0157:H7 infections are badly needed.

A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.

To avoid this infiltration the bacteria alter the permeability of their cell membranes, often by altering the structure of the doorways that let outside substances into the cell. This makes it harder, or impossible, for antibiotics to sneak in — essentially keeping the level of the drug below that needed to affect the bacteria.

Sometimes bacteria learn how to live and prosper in antimicrobial environments, such as the cleaning solutions in hospitals. As one journal article put it, "Contamination, mainly by Gram-negative bacteria, was found in 10 freshly prepared solutions and in 21 of 22 at discard."15??? Sometimes, they even learn to use the antibiotics for food.

The truth is much different. Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants. In essence, this is the passing on of acquired characteristics, something Lamarck insisted was possible and that neo-Darwinians have ridiculed ever since.

Ironically enough, it was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, who first warned of bacterial resistance. He noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered and by 1945 he warned in a New York Times interview that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria.

Steven Projan of Wyeth Research puts it, bacteria "are the oldest of living organisms and thus have been subject to three billion years of evolution in harsh environments and therefore have been selected to withstand chemical assault.

Bacteria, as a group, are, in actuality, an extremely large self-organized system that covers the entire world.

The largest ecosystem known is the bacterial world that exists in the basalt layers two miles deep in the ocean, underneath and inside the basalt layers that exist another 100 to 500 feet beneath the water. This "seam" of bacterial life extends completely around the globe, a single unified ecosystem that is foundational to everything above it.

They are not disease organisms bent on our destruction. They are something else entirely, the foundation of all life on this planet. As Margulis makes plain, "Bacteria are not really individuals so much as part of a single global superorganism."13 And that superorganism is in actuality an incredibly large community of highly intelligent interactive subparts, just as our white blood cells are of us (or as we, as individuals, are of the human communities in which we live).