“We Are Not Alone”

Five billion years ago, our planet earth was a very unfriendly
place, very hot with carbon dioxide gas bubbled from molten
rock and filled the atmosphere, causing such a massive
greenhouse effect that the planet literally boiled dry. Living
organism could not survive under those conditions. However,
when water vapour to liquefy just less than four billion years
ago, life was said to have appeared but was not life, as we know it
now. Molecules that could replicate to produce daughter
molecules with inherited characteristics, eventually microscopic single-celled organisms evolved.

These early life forms had to withstand volatile atmosphere with toxic gases, erupting volcanoes, dramatic electrical storms
and the sun’s ultraviolet rays all promoting uncontrolled electrochemical and photochemical reactions. The microbes
resembled today’s’, a type of bacteria so called because they thrive in all the particularly hostile corners of the globe.

Extremophiles

Inhabit acid lakes, hyper-saline salt marshes and the super

heated water issuing from hot vents at the bottom of the deepest
ocean trenches where they survive temperatures up to 150-250
degree C. They also lay buried deep in the polar ice caps, and
lurk in rocks. It is possible that life began with microbes in rocks
deep underground, where the heat is intense and there is an
ample supply of water and chemicals to get the whole process
started.

For around three billion years, bacteria had Earth all to themselves and they diversified to occupy every possible niche. At
this stage, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere so they evolved many different ways of unlocking the energy bound up
in rocks, utilizing chemical compounds of sulphur, nitrogen and iron.

Cynobacteria

Around 2-3 billion years ago, a group of innovative microbes called

the cynobacteria (previously called blue-green algae) learnt the trick of
photosynthesis, using sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy
rich carbohydrates.

As a result, oxygen, a waste product of this reaction, slowly accumulated in

Earth’s atmosphere. At first oxygen was poisonous to early life forms, but then
other ingenious bacteria discovered that it could also be used to generate energy. These new energy sources were rich
enough to support more complex life forms, but the emergence of multicultural organisms had to await the evolution of
eukaryotic cells.
Prokaryotes (Bacteria)

Bacteria are “prokaryotes”, meaning that their cells are smaller than those of all higher organisms “eukaryotes” and have a
simpler structure, lacking a well-defined nucleus. However, around a billion years ago, a group of free-living
photosynthetic cyanobacteria took up residence inside other primitive single-celled organisms to form the energy -
generating chloroplast of the first plant cells. In addition, in a similarly extraordinary manoeuvre, oxygen-utilizing
microbes called alpha proteobacteria (form of bacteria) became incorporated into other microbes as mitochondria, the
power house of animal cells.

Eukaryotic cells (Plants & Animals)

So finally, 6oo million years ago, the stage was set for the evolution of multicellular organisms and eventually the
emergence of the plants and animals we know today.

However, compared to the diversity of bacteria, all other life forms, however different they may seem, are homogeneous,
locked into the same biochemical cycle for energy production, and requiring sunlight for plant photosynthesis to generate
the oxygen used by animals for respiration.

We still rely on bacteria (in the form of chloroplasts

and mitochondria) for these reactions, and on free-
living bacteria for all other chemical processes
needed to maintain the stability of the planet. These
bacteria recycle the elements, which are essential for
life on Earth and are at the heart of our balanced
ecosystems, those complex interdependent
relationships that exist between plants, animals and the environment.

Although bacteria and single-celled protozoa (plasmodium) were the first to inhabit in our earth. The tiniest of all
microbes, viruses, probably also evolved several million years ago. They have diversified to infect all living things
including bacteria, but exactly how and when they came into being is unknown.
Viruses

The genetic material of viruses consists of either DNA or RNA, but most only code few proteins and cannot survive on
their own. Therefore, viruses are obligate parasites and only when they have sabotaged their host’s cells do they spring to
life. Once inside they turn the cell into a factory for virus production and within hours, thousands of new viruses are ready
to infect more cells or seek another host to colonize.

Evolution “Symbiotic Relationship”

Perhaps because they are so small, nowadays microbes

seem to be over shadowed by larger forms of life, but the
are still by far the most abundant on the planet, constituting
some twenty-five times the total biomass of all animal life.
There are well over a million different types, mostly
harmless environmental microbes. They are in the air we
breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat and when
we die, they set about deconstructing us. Each ton of soil
contains more than 50,000,000,000,000,000 microbes, many of which are employed in breaking down organic material to
generate essential nitrates for plants to utilize; every year nitrogen.-fixing bacteria recycle 140 million tons of atmospheric
nitrogen back into the soil.

Bacteria are masters at survival, and when adverse conditions come along, they are generally ready. Adaptability is the key
to their success, yet in theory reproducing by binary fission yields offspring that are all identical to the parent—a process
that apparently leaves no room for variability. However, although their DNA copying machinery is accurate, mistakes
occur which are corrected by a cellular proofreading system. Even so, occasional errors slip through unnoticed and these
heritable changes to the genetic code (mutations) may cause changes to their offspring. This muted virus becomes a new
strain that can attack human, animals or birds, similar to the new swine flu, which jumped from birds to pigs and now
attacking human.

This is the basis of evolution by natural selection. In humans and other animal’s evolutionary change is a slow process
because of our long generation times, but for bacteria, which reproduce very fast and have a less effective DNA
proofreading system, rapid change by mutation is their lifeline. A single bacterial gene mutates at a rate of one change per -
cell divisions, so in a rapidly dividing colony many thousands of mutants are thrown up. A few of these mutations will
confer a survival advantage and these progeny will then quickly out compete their rivals and come to dominate the
population.

Bacteria have several other tricks to help them adapt-

rapidly to a changing environment, mostly involving
gene swapping. Many bacteria contain plasmids,
circular DNA molecules that live inside the bacterial
cell but are separate from the chromosome and divide
independently.
They supply their host bacteria with extra survival information and can pass directly from one bacterium to another during
conjugation. This involves the outgrowth of a filament called a ‘sex pilus’ which acts like a temporary bridge between the
donor (male) and the neighbouring recipient (female) bacterium giving plasmids free access and allowing survival genes to
spread rapidly through bacterial communities. Several genes that code for antibiotic resistance, allowing bacteria to survive
in the face of antibiotic treatment, are carried on plasmids, and they have succeeded in spreading worldwide.

Another way that genes can jump between bacteria is by

using viruses called bacteriophages, or phages for short. All
viruses are cellular parasites, and phages commandeer the
bacteria’s protein making machinery to generate thousands
of their own offspring, most of which carry a copy of DNA
identical to the parent phage. But around one phage in a
million mistakenly picks up an extra piece of DNA, either
from the bacterial chromosome or from a resident plasmid,
and carries it to the next bacterium it infects, If this extra
piece of DNA codes for a protein that improves survival
then natural selection will ensure that the offspring of the
recipient bacterium will prosper at the expense of others.
With their host bacteria, with the phage being safely housed
inside the bacterium and the bacterium in turn being protected from infection by other more destructive phages.

Of the million or so microbes in existence, only 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans. However, despite their
significance to us, these pathogenic microbes are not primarily concerned with making us ill. The devastating symptoms
they produce are really just a side - effect of their life cycle being enacted inside our bodies. However, they certainly use
each step of the infection process to their own advantage, and natural selection ensures the microbes that induce disease
patterns that are best designed to assist their reproduction and spread survive at the expense of their more sluggish siblings.

Therefore, over time disease patterns have been sharply changed by evolution to ensure the survival of the causative
microbes. A highly virulent lifestyle, killing the
victim outright, is not advantageous to microbes as
they will then be without a home and probably die
along with their host. Yet less virulent microbes risk
being rapidly conquered by the host’s immune
system, and this curtails their spread. Over centuries
of coexistence of microbes and their human host,
evolution has fine-tuned the balance between these
two extremes to optimize survival of both species,
but the rapid adaptability of microbe’s means that they are generally one-step ahead in the ongoing struggle.
How Humans Contributed to Their Destruction

Antibiotics (in the last 40 years) paved the way for doctors to develop new technologies
(IVF, plastic surgery, hip replacement, minimally invasive surgery, stents, total
parenteral nutrition’s, transplant surgery and cardiac surgery). These technologies have
made some doctors rich and famous but now the very technology is threatening our
existence in this universe.

Healthcare professionals (often demanding patients) continued to treat virus infections

and prescribed antibiotics often in low concentration, this practice has successfully
helped us educate these bacteria to thrive on the very antibiotics that used to kill them.
Introducing bacteria present on the skin into our circulation has also given these
bacteria an opportunity to learn how to kill our white blood cells and destroy our
immune system.

We have been advising (www.medifix.org) healthcare professionals, medical device

manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies to help us reduce discarded
contaminated hospital waste in the
environment. They have not respected
our plea nor have they made any effort
to reduce introducing bacteria into our
body. One site on our body in an area
the size of a 2p coin was noted to be colonised with 132 million bugs, while
the average count was 16 million. Introducing bacteria into our body will help
these bacterias to quickly adopt, mutate and attack us. Flu & other viruses are
also helping these bacteria present in the nostrils to enter our body and lungs with ease and in return, the viruses have
learned to resist antiviral drugs.

Our politicians & media are advising us to wash hands often and companies are marketing antiseptics, germicidal soaps
and creams to kill these bugs. We know these bacteria and viruses are resistant to various chemicals and
antibiotics. Excessive use of antiseptics,
dis-infectants and washing hands will
destroy the very bacteria we need to help
us. Low concentrated chemicals tend to
make these bacteria learn to develop
resistance.

I really do not know how we can bring an

end to this evolutionary change, mutation
of virus, antibiotic resistant bacterial
infections and the win this “war of germs.”

Dr Kadiyali M Srivatsa