Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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. But when water vapour to liquefy just under 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.
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. But
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. And in a similarly extraordinary manoeuvre oxygen-utilizing
microbes called alpha proteobacteria became incorporated into other microbes as mitochondria,
the powerhouse of animal cells.
Bacteria and viruses are also a key part of marine ecosystems, forming by far the largest
biomass in the oceans. There are at least a million bacteria in every millilitre of seawater, most
abundant in estuarine waters where they break down organic matter. Marine viruses control the
numbers of these bacteria by infecting and killing them, particularly when they undergo a
population explosion and produce algal blooms. In coastal waters viruses greatly outnumber
bacteria, reaching concentrations of around 100 million in every millilitre, totaling an incredible
in the oceans. Tiny as they are, if placed end to end thei,- would stretch for to million light
years, or too times across the galaxy.2
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. But 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 is the basis of evolution by natural selection. In humans and other animals
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.
At some stage in the distant past, groups of resourceful microbes found a niche in or on the
bodies of other living things and evolved to parasitize host species. From that time on the
struggle for survival has shaped the evolution of both parties. On occasion, a comfortable
symbiotic relationship developed, like, for example, the microbial communities that form self-
sustaining ecosystems in the guts of their hosts. For ruminants such as cows the advantages
of this partnership are obvious; the microbes are bathed in nutrients and protected from the
outside world while they digest the cellulose in plant cell walls which cattle are unable to do for
themselves. In humans, however, the function of gut microbes is not so clear. We each house
up to 1014 microbes, weighing in total around t kg, and outnumbering our own body cells by ten
to one. So far, more than 400 different species have been identified which probably protect us
from attack by more virulent microbes, aid our digestion and stimulate our immunity.4 They are
harmless as long as we are healthy, but if they manage to invade our tissues, perhaps through
a surgical wound, they can cause nasty infections.
Of the million or so microbes in existence, only 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans.5
But despite their significance to us, these pathogenic microbes are not primarily concerned
with making us ill.
The sometimes 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. So over
time disease patterns have been sharply honed
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 also
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 microbes means that
"they are generally one step ahead in the ongoing struggle, we may never win".
___________________________________________________________________________
REFERENCE
"Deadly Companions"
By: Dorothy H Crawford
Delightful, well documented and enlightening. If you are keen to understand more
about micro-organism and how they have evolved and learn more about antibiotic
resistance, please read this book first.
“Knowledge about Health is Knowledge of Life”