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 group s
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 waste water, when we
process our sewage in treatment plants
before
leading it out in nature.
Bacteria are every where.Wherever there is
life on this planet, there are also bacteria.
They
live on their own or on and with in 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 cows 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 larges t
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
with stands 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 chemo autotrophs.
We normally consider oxygen as a prerequisite
for life but there are some bacteria to
which
oxygen is tox
ic. These organisms are
called anaerobic bacteria or anarobes.
Anarobes come in two kinds the obligate
a narobes, 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 Han s

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 every where 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.