Are We Really Humans Or Just A Bunch Of Bacteria? Too Many Misconceptions Here

Okay, I have just decided to take a break from my Aircraft series and talk about who we really are. No offence, some of us take Antibiotics whenever we have wounds be it major or just minor ones. Well, can we or do we really need to get rid of us?

Smallest, Yet The Most influential Organisms

Okay, a quick introduction as many of us already know what these guys are. Bacteria, sometimes called Prokaryotes are microscopic single-cell organisms that do not have nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles. Most bacteria have the same major parts. A protective cell walls, a cell membrane and a strand of DNA. Bacteria are round or spiral shaped. Some are easily wiped out by medicines (Antibiotics) while some have ability to resist them.

Out of the three groups that Biology use in classifying three organisms, Bacteria make up two of them: Archaebacteria and Eubacteria. Archaebacteria have unique genes that allow them to be able to get energy from sources such as NH4, CH4 and H ( meaning Amonium, Methane and Hydrogen gas). But trust me, being classified as Archaebacteria is just a misconception and I am going to make you understand that right on this post. Most Bacteria are however found to be Eubacteria.

I believe we have all heard the word Bacteria and we normally associate them with kind of negative things and whenever we hear about them, all we can think of is germs. Well, Bacteria indeed are germs and they cause all set of negative things at least from our standard point of view. So let us just list some of these bad things may be to be on the same side that most people are, you know stuffs like that...

The Bad Things These guys Do

They cause a lots of diseases like:

• Tuberculosis.
• Lyme disease.

I can go on and on. But be careful here. Whenever people talk about infection, it is often caused by Bacteria. Well it can also be caused by virus. In general, infection is anything entering you and taking advantage of your body to kind of replicate itself and thus making you sick. So we also have:

• Bacteria infections.

And this whole perception of being a bad thing is the reason why many of the soaps you see now have anti bacterial because the makers of these soaps understand that many people regard bacteria as being the bad guys.

Well, They Can Be Gentlemen Sometimes

Okay, I know where you are going. Like bacteria are all bad. But let me tell you here that there are some good traits of these gentlemen.

• Like I can place some bacteria in some milk and then they give me Yoghurt. Here is the thing, forget the hurt in there, we all know that these guys do not hurt us in Yogurt.
• And again I have Bacteria in my gut which help me digest food.

Well, despite these good stuffs these guys do, I still think they are bad. Okay, I am not going to take side here as that may sound unfair you know, but I am just going to point at the fact that you are to large degree made up of Bacteria, not just your gut or the Yogurt that you eat or the plaque in your teeth which is caused by Bacteria, the pimples on your face. Bacteria actually represent the majority of the cells on your body.

And What If I Call 'Us' The Smarter Bacteria?

Here is one fact you need to understand: For every one human cell, I mean all cells that you have in your DNA (trust me I will talk about that in a second), you have twenty Bacteria. Now I know how stubborn you are and your response right now is "well, that is fair enough" but the Bacteria must be much smaller than the human cells. So it must be of a very small fraction of my mass. And you are right, it is not like we are mostly Bacteria by mass although we are mostly Bacteria by cells. But even if you take out all the water in your body, then by mass, Bacteria is going to be roughly 10% of your mass. So if I weigh about 150 pounds, I got 15 pounds of Bacteria walking around with me.

So you know we kind of think of ourselves like Bacteria is riding on us, but to our knowledge degree, we are kind of symbiosis, what kind of two creatures, (we are not just two creatures), two types of creatures living together because I do not have one type of Bacteria on me, I have thousands of type of Bacteria on me. They are of huge amount of diversity and we are just scratching the surface in terms of the number and types and diversity of the Bacteria that exist. May be this factor right here will make you realise that they are super important to our everyday existence. We have ten to hundred trillion cells. So, for every one of these, we have twenty Bacteria, then we are saying we have within two hundred to two thousand trillion Bacteria on ourselves anytime.

I am an hygienic person, Like I take shower everyday and yet they are on me. It is not like we can somehow eliminate them and it is not like you want to eliminate them. But that is fair enough. You are probably asking yourself that okay I am convinced that Bacteria are important and what they actually look like. Like i said earlier, they are these small unicellular organisms. They are different from the cells that make up us. When I say us I mean all plants, animals and fungi. And the big difference that people notice is that Eulcarya which include plants, animals and fungi have their DNA inside the nucleus. In Bacteria there is no membrane surrounding the DNA. So what they have is just a big bundle of DNA sometimes in a loop or one circle called a Nucleoid.

Now whenever we look at something , we say "oh we have this thing, it does not exist", with assumption that we are superior or more advanced beings but the reality is that Bacteria have infiltrated far more equal systems at every part of the planet than Eulcarya have. There is far more diversity in Bacteria and than it is in Eulcarya. So when you really think about it, these are the more successful organisms. So if something bad is to hit the earth (God forbid), the organisms that are more likely to survive are the bacteria rather than the organisms that have nucleus and membrane. They have ability to survive where Eulcarya can not. They can survive just anywhere they found themselves.

Bacteria have these big bags for cytoplasm, they have their DNA their because they have to coat for proteins just like the rest of us. And in some of those proteins, they make this food gella with a tail that allows them to move around. They also have this thing called Pilis. With pili, Bacteria are able to do one form of introducing genetic variation into their populations.

I will take a little side note here. I am pointing at Bacteria not having cell walls. Actually there is another class that used to be categorised as a type of Bacteria. They are called ``Archaea``` and I should give them a little bit of justice. They are always kind of a step-child. They used to be called Archaea Bacteria (I think I mentioned that earlier) but now people realized that they actually look like DNA. Looking into these, they say okay these guys also do not have Nucleus and a bunch of DNA running around. This must be a form of Bacteria but now we have to look at the DNA of this thing and we have seen that there is a quite difference.

Both Bacteria and Archaea are considered as Prokaryotes. This simply means no nucleus. No nucleus is what most people refer to to but more generally, they do not have these membrane bound organelle as cells have.

How These Guys Reproduce? Trust Me, I Do Not want To Call It Sexual

Now, the next question you might want to ask is how these bacteria reproduce. For the most, they do something not completely different from Mytos. This is called Binary Fission. I am not going to go into the deep mechanism here but the idea is pretty simple. Here is it. I have a Bacteria and you know, it replicates its DNA and then we have two nucleus. And the cytoplasm sensually splits meaning you have two of them. And then each of them can coat to the protein necessary to produce that long tail thing that help them move. This is exceptionally fascinating because it is operating in such a small scale but you can still kind of get this ode of movement going on even if it is in a very small scale. That is you can still get this wave like motion that can move the bacteria around.

We see evolution everyday and Bacteria is one of the examples. You know we use antibiotic things as we think they will help eliminate Bacteria, but there is one Bacteria that has some kind of resistance. It will survive and so it is more fit. Then how do these guys get variation? There is one way, and this is the way everything can get variation. I am saying they can get mutation. Bacteria replicates so quickly, they reproduce so quickly that even if you have mutations one every thousand times.

They also have this form... I do not want to call it sexual reproduction because it is not sexual reproduction. Okay, here is it: Two Bacteria can get near each other and then one of their pilus can connect from one Bacteria to another. and then you have the mixing of what is inside one Bacteria to another. Let us say one of the two Bacteria got this extra need plasma it got at some place and this will be making it do things that the second Bacteria could not do. So let us say what this first guy got is a plasm that makes Bacteria resistant to antibiotics, what happens now is that since there is this mechanism between them, the first guy will replicate that plasm and pass one to the second guy so he can also resist antibiotics that their host is taking.

We also have that part of DNA that can jump from Bacteria to another and you can bet (probably with your girlfriend) that the pilus connection helps get work done here. So what we have here is not a form of sexual reproduction but just a connection where Bacteria are casually swapping DNA with each other. That is DNA jumping back and fort. So you can imagine now that if a particular stuff is originally in what we used to call Bacteria species, it can quickly transfer to multiple species and then create resistance to different things like antibiotics. So this can kind of spread the information that then produce those resistance proteins or whatever to the other bacteria. So this is a kind of form of introducing variation. That is when they transfer stuff through all those pilus or pili, this is called Conjugation. Bacteria Conjugation to be precise.

So Now Dude, How About Antibiotics?

I know that when a lot of people get sick, the first thing they want to get is Antibiotic. Antibiotic is a whole class of chemicals and compounds, some of them naturally derived, some of them not, that kill Bacteria. So let us say someone is getting surgery and he gets a cut, so instead of him to be worried of getting infections, he takes some Antibiotics to prevent the Bacteria from growing on them.

Okay, Doff That Cap Of Yours For Alexander

Now the question is how this (Antibiotic) was discovered and where it came from. Well, this came from Alexander Fleming. Very important. Why? Trust me, or okay, in my opinion is the most important discovery of medicines so far. He was studying.. is it staphylococcus? Yeah, on Petri Dish, there some nutrients of Bacteria can grow on. So he went out and he came back into the room and he saw that some bluish greenish fungi has grown on the center of the Petri Dish. And there are some kind of space surrounding it and the Bacteria cannot get close to it. This Fungi is called the Penicillium Fungi.

He was able to figure it out. He took a sample of this and then he cultured it, meaning letting it grow and then seeing what it is. He figured out that this fungi must have something, like some chemical that are killing the Bacteria, stopping them from getting near it. And behold, that lead to the discovery of Penicillin. And now that he discovered this in the 1920s, by the time World War 2 came around, people had gunshot wounds and had to get things amputated. For the first time, they could give people Antibiotics and no more had to worry about bacteria Infections as much as they did before.

Now you know if you have Bacteria infections, Tuberculosis or Lyme Diseases, the treatment all involve taking Antibiotics. There so many types of Antibiotics out there coming from many more different sources but the general idea is the same: You want to kill Bacteria. Although you do not want to kill all Bacteria as there so many of them that are good. In fact, we are made up of a lot of Bacteria.

Oh, I did not mention this before, there are some Bacteria on the skin that help take off oil and moisturize the skin, thereby making it nice. So you know, the way you think about them, you can view them as negative or as positive, or you can just settle in between, but what I want you to understand is tat we are living in symbiosis with them.

We have these people, some alien race that look very much like humans. But it turns out that they have these little bugs in their brain. These are controlling their brains and making them act weird. This is pretty much a bizarre alien concept. But if you really think about it, it is not about just one little bug, it is about millions, trillions of bugs that are with us everyday and they make us us. I mean I am here writing a STEM post, but I think I should just say a Bacteria writing a STEM post about Bacteria. Fascinating!

Departing Thoughts

It is known that the Bacteria can even affect our mental state. There is a bunch whole new research now that says certain kind of bacteria can cause depression and lyme disease that can affect the mental condition of the person who has the infection. So for every part of who we are, it is hard to even talk of being human being without the 10% of our mass that is, two thousand trillions of Bacteria that make us us. See you again soon!

References

• Bacteria
• About Microbiology - bacteria
• Bacteria - Good, bad & ugly
• Understand and protect against bacteria, viruses and infections

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