Microbial genetics
Robert Hooke and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discoveries involved depictions, observations, and descriptions of microorganisms.
[5] Microbial genetics also has applications in being able to study processes and pathways that are similar to those found in humans such as drug metabolism.
[9] Bacterial genetics studies the mechanisms of their heritable information, their chromosomes, plasmids, transposons, and phages.
[10] Gene transfer systems that have been extensively studied in bacteria include genetic transformation, conjugation and transduction.
The uptake of donor DNA and its recombinational incorporation into the recipient chromosome depends on the expression of numerous bacterial genes whose products direct this process.
[11][12] In general, transformation is a complex, energy-requiring developmental process that appears to be an adaptation for repairing DNA damage.
Bacterial conjugation has been extensively studied in Escherichia coli, but also occurs in other bacteria such as Mycobacterium smegmatis.
Transduction is a common tool used by molecular biologists to stably introduce a foreign gene into a host cell's genome.
Cellular aggregation mediates chromosomal marker exchange and genetic recombination with high frequency.
[25] DNA replication of Archaea involves similar processes including initiation, elongation, and termination.
Archaea are similar to mitochondria in eukaryotes in that they release energy as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) through the chemical reaction called metabolism.
Archaea that live in extreme and harsh environments with low pH levels such as salt lakes, oceans, and in the gut of ruminants and humans are also known as extremophiles.
It is used as a model organism because it is easy to grow and has a haploid life cycle that makes genetic analysis simple since recessive traits will show up in the offspring.
Neurospora was used by Edward Tatum and George Beadle in their experiments[29] for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958.
During vegetative growth that ordinarily occurs when nutrients are abundant, S. cerevisiae reproduces by mitosis as diploid cells.
Ruderfer et al.[32] pointed out that, in nature, such contacts are frequent between closely related yeast cells for two reasons.
An analysis of the ancestry of natural S. cerevisiae strains concluded that outcrossing occurs very infrequently (only about once every 50,000 cell divisions).
Rather, a short-term benefit, such as meiotic recombinational repair of DNA damages caused by stressful conditions (such as starvation)[33] may be the key to the maintenance of sex in S. cerevisiae.
[34] Johnson[34] suggested that mating strategies may allow C. albicans to survive in the hostile environment of a mammalian host.
[38][39][40] When clonally aged P. tetraurelia are stimulated to undergo meiosis in association with either autogamy or conjugation, the progeny are rejuvenated, and are able to have many more mitotic binary fission divisions.
[46] A virus can affect any part of the body causing a wide range of illnesses such as the flu, the common cold, and sexually transmitted diseases.
[48] With symptoms like sore throat, sneezing, small fever, and a cough, the common cold is usually harmless and tends to clear up within a week or so.
[56] Additionally the development of recombinant DNA technology through the use of bacteria has led to the birth of modern genetic engineering and biotechnology.
Such genetically engineered bacteria can produce pharmaceuticals such as insulin, human growth hormone, interferons and blood clotting factors.
They're like millions of tiny pharmaceutical machines that only require basic raw materials and the right environment to produce a large amount of product.
It is thought that biofactories might be the ultimate key in reducing the price of expensive life saving pharmaceutical compounds.
Microbial surfactants would still have the same kind of hydrophillic and hydrophobic functional groups as their petroleum-based counterparts, but they have numerous advantages over their competition.
Enzymes perform a wide variety of functions inside the cells of living things, so it only makes sense that we can use them for similar purposes on a larger scale.
Industrial applications of lipases generally include the enzyme as a more efficient and cost-effective catalyst in the production of commercially valuable chemicals from fats and oils, because they are able to retain their specific properties in mild easy to maintain conditions and work at an increased rate.
This combination of conventional and biological advancement is just now becoming utilized and provides a virtually limitless number of applications.
