• Question: Do you think bacteria are helpful? which bacteria are your favourite?

    Asked by anon-181914 on 12 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Jason Chu

      Jason Chu answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      With many things in life, we’ve got the good ones and bad ones. And this is the case with bacteria.
      A particularly fast growing area of research is the bacteria that you find in your gut. There are thousands and millions of them in our gut, and they important in keeping us healthy and ticking along. They have lots of jobs – everything from helping us breakdown and use nutrients to preventing bad bacteria from infecting us.
      If I had to choose a favourite bacteria it has to be streptococcus thermophilus. This is widely used in the dairy industry to make things like mozzarella. Which is beautiful when cooked on top of a pizza.

    • Photo: Liza Selley

      Liza Selley answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Scientific experiments themselves sometimes rely on bacteria. There is a very common technique called PCR that we use to copy and count genes.

      This technique uses a protein that comes from a type of bacteria called Thermus aquaticus. Without PCR our scientific knowledge would be much less advanced (and I wouldn’t have got my PhD!) so that’s why Thermus aquaticus is my favourite. That and the fact it lives in hot springs – we could hang out in the jacuzzi together 🙂

    • Photo: Alex Haragan

      Alex Haragan answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      Bacteria is a really, really broad term that refers to a specific type of single-cell life. There are more species of bacteria than every other life form put together.
      >
      So it stands to reason some are “good” and some are “bad”. I would say they are mostly just trying to survive wherever they find themselves.
      And they are extremely adaptable! No matter what happens to earth – bacteria always seem to find a way to live.
      >
      Perhaps one of the most interesting things is that more complex creatures, like humans, have evolved entirely dependent on certain species of bacteria. The major example as Jason has said is the bacteria that live within your gut. Without bacteria – none of us could live.
      >
      Of course other bacteria are harmful to humans – but most are neither good nor bad from our perspective, the majority of the time.
      >
      To illustrate just how hardy they are – my favourite, (But I don’t know if its been classified yet) is the stuff they found growing on the outside of the space station last year. Tests show it didn’t go up with them – so not only can it live in space – it might even have come from space in the first place. Pretty amazing!

    • Photo: Joey Shepherd

      Joey Shepherd answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I’m a microbiologist – I study bacteria – so I love the little guys, I think they are incredible!!!

      There is such a vast number of bacteria on our planet that it’s difficult to imagine. In fact, there are ten times as many bacterial cells in and on your body as there are human cells (!) and the vast majority of the time we all live side by side quite happily with bacteria causing us no harm at all. And it’s not just on humans, bacteria can be found everywhere – in the air, on trees, in soil, in oil, in pipes, on plastic, on animals, anywhere you can think of really.

      Bacteria can *absoloutely* be helpful – as well as the bacteria in your gut which Jason talked about, which help us digest our food, make viatmins that we can absorb, and prevent other ‘bad’ bacteria from settling in, they are also in other animals guts – cows for example, could not digest grass properly without their gut bacteria. They are very important for keeping us healthy – it is usually when things become unbalanced or bacteria get into the wrong place that they cause harm. So for instance, if you have to take antibiotics (which kill bacteria) for a long time because you have a bad infection, you can get a poorly stomach because you have also killed the helpful bacteria in your gut. And we have lots of bacteria that live on our skin and do no harm, but if you get a cut in your skin and the skin bacteria enter your body (getting in the wrong place) then they can cause an infection.
      We also use them in the manufacture of food and drink (cheese, yoghurt, beer) and other microrganisms (yeast) for baking bread and cakes. We use them in water treatment plants to help us clean up our water. There are even bacteria that love eating oil and turn it into water and carbon dioxide, so they have been used to help clean up oil spills in the ocean.

      All in all they are fascinating lifeforms!

    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      As an infectious disease biologist, I’m more interested in the bacteria that make us sick. However, there is a bacteria that we have found is good at stopping viruses spread by mosquitoes. Its called Wolbachia and it lives inside the cells of lots of different insects, including some mosquitoes. Scientists have found that the mosquitoes that have this bacteria do not spread viruses. They also found that if you give the Wolbachia bacteria to mosquitoes that do spread viruses, it then stops the spread of the infection. This is a really exciting area of research and could save many lives lost due to viruses spread by mosquitoes. They have already started to do field trails in countries like Malaysia.

      Who knows if, in the future, we will find a bacteria we can give to people to stop them getting sick!

    • Photo: Hannah Farley

      Hannah Farley answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I use bacteria as a helpful tool in my science (lots of scientists do this, I’m not alone). We can make rings of DNA containing the genes we study, sometimes adding tags or markers to those genes or editing them in other ways. We then put them into bacteria by “heat-shocking” them – we literally put them on ice for 30 mins, then at 42 degrees in a water bath for 1 min, then cool them down on ice. We then grow them up (i.e. the bacteria divide lots and lots) in growth juices containing all the nutrients they need, in a massive incubator that shakes the tubes to make sure they get enough air. You can tell whether the bacteria have taken up your DNA because we include a gene for antibiotic resistance – so as soon as you add antibiotics to your growth juices, bacteria without the special DNA we have added will die. This is a really helpful way to get large quantities of specific bits of DNA, which we can then use for other experiments. Most people use E. coli for this – you can buy special versions of E. coli off what is basically Amazon for scientists that are better at taking up DNA or you can even make your own by growing them in a special way. So those E. coli are pretty helpful to me, and they’re my favourite when they work.

Comments

  • Photo: joeyshepherd

    joeyshepherd commented on :

    I’m sorry, I got so carried away I forgot to tell you about my favourite! There are a lot to choose from – I like extremophiles, which can survive at really high temperatures, pressures, or salt concentrations, but my favourite is probably Pseudomonas aeruginosa – it’s fascinating to work with because it does cause a lot of diseases if it gets into the wrong places, and it swims around really fast 🙂