Hello my name is Peder Worning I work at Hvidovre

Hospital as bioinformatician, in this presentation I will give you an introduction

to the incredibly
diverse world of bacteria. Bacteria are unicellular microorganisms. That
means that they are extremely small, invisible to the naked eye, and that contrary
to multicellular
organisms, such as oak trees or tigers, each bacterium consists of just one cell.
Bacteria live in vast numbers in all places
where there is life on this planet. They are not categorized as plants or animals,
but
are in a way below that level of categorization, being made of cells that are much
simpler
than those that make up plants or animals. Like other scientific disciplines,
bacteriology
– the study of bacteria – is characterized by technical and specialized language,
much
of it of Greek and Latin origin. At first encounter this may seem confusing. In
this
presentation I will introduce you to the great diversity of bacteria on Earth,
including
some basic classification and examples of bacteria, and a certain amount of jargon
is
unavoidable. I will, however, try to remember to always give a definition when a
new concept
is introduced. I started out by saying that bacteria a unicellular,
and that a bacteria cell is simpler than cells that make up multicellular
organisms. One
difference is that the cells of plants, animals and fungi are organized by
membranes, while
bacterial cells only have one space inside the cell. The multi-room cells are
called
eukariots and the bacterial one-room cells are called procariotes. Prokaryotes are
divided into two large groups
called Bacteria and Archaea. I will not differentiate between Bacteria and Archaea
in this lecture,
although they are very different on the phylogenitic level. When I say Bacteria I
mean prokaryotes. Bacterial cells can have many shapes, a few
of them is shown in this picture The spherical bacteria are
called coccus, the elongated are called bacillus and the long spiral ones are
called spirochetes.
Many bacteria have a flagell - a protein tail that they can use to move around,
like the
tail of a tadpole. It is estimated that there are about a thousand
billion billion billion or 1030 bacterial cells on Earth. This is a very large
number
that can be difficult to imagine. It is like the number of atoms in 10.000 liters
of water
or about ten million times the number of stars in the universe. All these bacteria
weigh
a million billion kilograms or 2.000 times as much as the 7 billion people on
Earth. The reason that there are so many of them
is that they are extremely adaptive and very small. Bacteria are between 0.1 and 5
micrometer
long. In the lab we normally see bacteria as colonies
on a petri dish. A colony, so small that it is barely visible, can contain a
million bacteria,
and a colony one millimeter across contains a billion. Bacteria can grow very fast.
The fastest growing
organism known to man is Clostridium perfringens. Given the right conditions it has
a generation
time of 6 minutes and twenty seconds. This means that one cell can become a
thousand
in one hour and 3 minutes, a million in two hours and 7 minutes and a billion in
three
hours and ten minutes. Clostridium perfringens is an extremly fast species, but
bacteria
as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus can grow with a generation time of
about twenty
minutes, so things move fast in the bacterial world. The Nitrogen Cycle - Bacteria
makes the world go around Nitrogen is one of the most important elements
for all life. The amino acids in our proteins and the nucleotides in our DNA and
RNA contain
nitrogen. There is a lot of nitrogen on Earth, 80 % of our atmosphere is nitrogen
in the
form of N2. But N2 is chemically a very stable molecule that cannot be used by
plants, fungi
or animals to make amino acids or nucloetides. The nitrogen in the air must be
converted
to ammonium so plants can use it as fertilizers and build it into proteins and
nucleotides. Bacteria are the only living organisms that
can bind N2 from the air and convert it into ammonium, so it can be used by other
living
organisms. It is called nitrogen fixation and it is a very important process for
the
continuation of life here on Earth. If bacteria were not able to fixate nitrogen
from the
air all the nitrogen in living organisms would eventually end as N2 in the air, and
life
on Earth would die out. Plants of the Legume family - such as peas,
beans and lentils - can fixate nitrogen from the air. They can do this because they
have
a symbiotic relationship with the nitrogen fixating Rhizobia bacteria that live in
the
roots of the plant. The picture shows Rhizobia nodules at the roots of a bean
plant.
Bacteria can also convert ammonium to nitrate and nitrate to free nitrogen N2. In
that way
the nitrogen cycle is completed. The process where nitrogen is extracted from
solution, converted to free nitrogen and released into the air is called
denitrification. We
use bacteria with this dentrification ability to remove nitrogen from wastewater,
when we
process our sewage in treatment plants before leading it out in nature. Bacteria
are [Link] there is
life on this planet, there are also bacteria. They live on their own or on and
within plants
and animals. The Rhizobia bacteria living in the roots of Legume plants is only a
single
example of their symbiosis with multicellular organisms. In fact, all animals with
a gut
have bacteria living in the gut that help them digest the food.
In many ways bacteria are absolutely necessary for our utilization of the food we
eat. They
make vitamins in our gut, regulate our immune system and keep pathogenic bacteria
away. For cows and other grass eating mammals the
bacteria in the gut play a very important role. Grass is mostly made of cellulose -
a
polysaccharide that no mammal enzyme can break down. This is also known as dietary
fiber.
Diatary fibers are good for our digestion, but they don't contribute to our
nutrition.
You won't get fat by eating grass, but cows do. The bacteria living in a cow’s gut
can
break down the cellulose into simple sugars that the cows can use as nutrition. In
other
words: it is the gut bacteria that make it possible for grass eating animals to
utilize
the energy of the grass. Bacteria are highly adaptive, and they can
live in the most extreme environments. Some bacteria can survive in hot springs at
120°
Celcius and grow above 100° C. Bacteria living at very high temperatures are called
thermophiles. In the 80° C hot water of the hot springs
in Yellowstone National Park you can find the bacteria Thermus aquaticus. The
picture
shows the Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring in Yellowstone. The bright
colors
are due to bacteria living at different temperatures in the hot spring. The
temperature is highest
in the middle of the spring and falls towards the shore. This type of bacteria has
become
kind of a celebrity among molecular biologists, because it has revolutionized all
work with
DNA. The wonder of this enzyme, is that it withstands the repeated heatings to 80°
C,
that is needed to separate the DNA strands to melt DNA for duplication. A very
well-known
application of this is the DNA test on crime scenes made by the police. This would
not
have been possible without the thermophilic bacteria. There are even bacteria
living in the radioactive
waste from nuclear power plants. The bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans can stand
extremely
high amounts of radioactivity. For a cell the greatest threat from radiation is
that
it can break the DNA. As a defense mechanism the D. radiodurans has four copies of
its
DNA in each cell, and the ability to use the other copies to repair a broken
chromosome. The water in the Dead Sea is a saturated salt
brine in which neither fish, nor shellfish nor plants can live. Some bacteria
however,
have evolved to be able to live in this extremely salty environment. They are
called halophiles.
That means ‘salt lovers’. As these examples show, Bacteria are the forefront
of life on our planet, they live in the most extreme environments and they were the
very
first forms of life on this planet. In the first 2 billion years of life they were
in
fact the only kind of life on the planet. Cyanobacteria is a large group of
bacteria
that can make photosynthesis. They do not need organic material for life, but can
make
all they need from sun light, water, CO2 and inorganic salts. The cyanobacteria
make up
the first step in the global food chain. The photosynthesis we know from plants is
an evolutionary
descendant from cyanobacteria. Bacteria that can live using only inorganic
material and sunlight are called photoautotrophs. But the opposite also exists.
Deep in the
Earth and on the ocean floor you can find bacteria that do not even need light to
survive.
These forms of bacteria extract energy from inorganic chemical reactions like
oxidating
Fe2+ to Fe3+, oxidating Mangan or Sulfur. They can even build new cells from
inorganic
material alone. This kind of bacteria are called chemoautotrophs. We normally
consider oxygen as a prerequisite
for life – but there are some bacteria to which oxygen is toxic. These organisms
are
called anaerobic bacteria – or anarobes. Anarobes come in two kinds – the obligate
anarobes, to whom oxygen is toxic, and the facultative anarobes, which can tolerate
oxygen,
but grow better without it. Bacteria that grow best with Oxygen are called aerobes.
There are many ways to charaterise bacteria
and one of the most important methods, when it comes to pathogenic bacteria, was
invented
in 1884 by the Danish medical doctor Hans Christian Gram as a coloring technique
used
to visualize bacterial cells in the microscope. The method is called Gram staining
and it
divides bacteria into two large groups: the Gram-positive that become purple and
the Gram-negative
that becomes pink. The picture shows Gram staining of the Gran-positive
Staphylococcus
aureus and the Gram-negative E. coli. The difference between Gram-positive and
Gram-negative
cells is determined by the way the cell wall is arranged relative to the cell
membrane.
The Gram-positive cell has the cell wall outside the membrane, while the Gram-
negative cell
has two membranes and the cell wall is located between the two membranes. The Gram
stain
shows a very fundamental difference between bacterial cells. A difference that
determines
which type of antibiotic that can be used to combat a bacterial infection. The Gram
stain is fairly easy to make and it is almost always the first step in the
identification
of a bacterial infection. To summarize: Bacteria are small unicellular
organisms with very simple cells, that are extremely adaptive. They can grow in
very
hostile environment above 100 C in high radiation, in very dry and in very salty
environment.
Bacteria are absolutely necessary for life on Earth. But they are also very
dangerous
, because they are the reason for some of our most severe diseases. Bacteria are
the
fastest growing organisms on Earth, and they exist in enormous numbers everywhere
on this
planet. When they cause infection, they are normally characterized by a staining
technique
called Gram stain, that divide them into two groups Gram-negative and Gram-positive
bacteria.
This difference is very fundamental and it is determined by the way the cell wall
are
arranged relative to the cell membrane. Gram-positive and Gram-positive bacteria
are normally treated
with different kind of antibiotics.