Quotes About Microorganisms

Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms.

If I were looking for a bacterium that could eat oil, I'd be collecting samples of dirt from the middle of busy freeways. I don't know if I'd find one, but I'm sure I'd discover something interesting.

microbial resistance to antibiotics…

The human body harbored ten times more bacteria than it had cells of its own. In fact, more than thirty times as many bacteria could be found in an ounce of fecal matter than there were humans in the world.

Streptomycin belongs to a group of compounds, known as antibiotics, which are produced by microorganisms and which possess the property of inhibiting the growth and even of destroying other microorganisms.

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.

The problem with killing 99.9 percent of bacteria is that most of them protect us from the few that can make us sick.

Recent study of beetle digestive tracts has found more than 650 distinct yeasts, at least 200 of which were previously unidentified

Are the acidifying bacteria in milk or the yeasts in grape juice our servants, or are we doing their bidding by creating the specialized environments in which they can proliferate so wildly? We must stop thinking in such hierarchical terms and recognize that we, like all creation, are participants in infinite interrelated biological feedback loops, simultaneously unfolding a vast multiplicity of interdependent evolutionary narratives.

Okay, back to business. Billy grins, leaning back against the cushions. Give me two more characteristics of living things. I'll give you a hint: you left out the most fun one. Fun one? Im picturing the textbook, responsiveness, growth, complex organizations, metabolism, responsiveness... Oh! I hit Billy. You are such a perv! Who me? What are you talking about? The most fun one? Reproduction? Hey, even microorganisms gotta have fun, right?

The human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin, and elsewhere, harbors three thousand kinds of bacteria with 3 million distinct genes. (Our own cells struggle by on only eighteen thousand genes or so.)

The majority of life on Earth is microbial

When we get there, if we don't find any life on Mars, from that point on there will be life on Mars because we'll bring it there, whether it's germs and leftover urine bags, whatever it is.

My bacteria glow in the dark - no human being doesn't like that.

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms - a hundred trillion or more.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

Amoebas at the start Were not complex; They tore themselves apart And started Sex.

Just as the supposed number may differ from the true number by fully 100, 150, or even 200 in a flock of 600 sheep, so may I be even more out of my reckoning in the case of these very little animalcules.

It's hard for most of us to accept that we are nine parts microbe and only one part human, at least as far as a count of our cells goes.

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface.

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children's health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in ...our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

You think of yourselves as human beings, but I think of you as 99 percent bacterial.

It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.