3 ms·
Many (perhaps most) bacteria are specialized for very specific environments. There's tons of strains that are hard or impossible to cultivate in order to study
by jccooper 12y ago
Many (perhaps most) bacteria are specialized for very specific environments. There's tons of strains that are hard or impossible to cultivate in order to study or measure.
http://jb.asm.org/content/194/16/4151.full http://jb.asm.org/content/194/16/4151.full
Among infectious bacteria, it's common that they only survive in specific host species.
So for any specific bacteria, odds are they wouldn't find an extraterrestrial life form a nice place. (And viruses are probably right out; I doubt a completely alien genetic system would be hackable by Earth viruses.) But there are so darn many bacteria, probably something would manage to infect a Martian.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThanks for the link! I always thought that we know how to cultivate every bacteria we've met. I learned something very interesting today :).
- jccooper 12y agoThere have been some recent advances, notably in soil bacteria. For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC127570/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC127570/ (you can also find some more popular accounts if you look around.) We'll probably be making advances in that area for a long, long time, what with the number and variety of microorganisms out there.
- Retric 12y ago"Among infectious bacteria, it's common that they only survive in specific host species." That may be less true than generally assumed. It was very difficult to find out bacteria X survives in environment Y. Even with ‘cheap’ DNA testing it's still much harder than you might think. Don't forget we still don’t actually know all of the bacteria thrive in the human intestines. The wider ecology of Microbiology is almost a blank slate.