Bacteria in and on your body have huge impacts on your overall health. By breaking down food and waste of your body, they produce healthy molecules that affect your brain, heart, gut and muscles.
When bacteria enter our bodies, they encounter a whole range of stressful situations. However, some pathogens, like Salmonella, learned several clever ways to deal with these stresses. They manage to adapt to the changing temperature, pH and the reduced food available. This helps this bacterium to infect us and even make us sick.
The microbial world is super colorful and diverse.
Even though, we sometimes hear too many negative news articles about certain players of the microbial world, we should not forget about all the other interesting and helpful microbes.
To remind you that the microbial world consists of so many more players, we assembled this list of common and interesting microbes.
Microbes and bacteria touch every aspect of our lives. They have so many superpowers that impact the environment, food production, bioremediation and even the climate. Here, we will look at 20 of the most fascinating bacterial superpowers and tell you where you might encounter them throughout your day. But don’t forget, there are plenty more.
The differences between bacteria and viruses are based on their structure, size and reproduction. While bacteria are generally considered living organisms, viruses are not.
Your gut microbiome is full of helpful and fascinating bacteria. They all work together to keep you healthy, digest your food and fight off intruders. Here, you will learn about what a healthy gut microbiome is, what it does and how to keep it.
To protect themselves from the environment, bacteria build shielding biofilms houses. But once such a house gets old, bacteria need to break out it. For that, bacteria produce special scissors that can break biofilms and set free the bacteria.
Bacteria have powerful killing machines with which they carve out their own niches. To kill competitors, bacteria from the Vibrio family, have a powerful crossbow and its arrows availble. However, these bacteria can decide whether they risk a kill and take up what’s left of the dead prey or they escape the dangerous situation. Here, we look at how bacteria decide to kill or flee.
Bacteria can sense the iron concentration of their environment thanks to special iron transporters, of which they produce multiple.
Bacteria in your mouth protect your teeth from pathogenic bacteria. When you eat lots of sugars, the pathogens can fight off your friendly bacteria. The more pathogenic bacteria grow on your teeth, the more acids they produce that can cause caries and cavities. Learn about the bacterial battles in your mouths.
Pathogenic bacteria developed different mechanisms to attach to human host cells. However, our immune system learned to fight back, so that a constant battle between bacteria and host is happening in our bodies.
Some pathogenic bacteria use a weapon which is called type 3 secretion system to infect their host targets.
Bacteria developed different antimicrobial resistance mechanisms to get rid of antibiotics. Here, you will learn what bacteria do with antibiotics so that they don’t harm them and what superbugs are.