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My Interest in Microbiology
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My Interest in Microbiology Since the turn of the new year in the winter of 2018, I have renewed my interest in microbiology. When I was a and in the 1960s-70s, my parents gave me two microscopes, one from a microscope kit and the other a used microscope. I vividly remember being fascinated at looking at microscopic protozoa, algae, bacteria and my own body cells with were epithelial skin cells from the inside of my cheeks, blood and sperm cells. Those microscopes had a maximum magnification of 400x power. This February 2018, I mail ordered two microscopes on eBay and several biology kits for growing bacteria and protozoa cultures. This past year I have been examining bacteria cultures at 40x, 100x and 400x magnifications. I have been successful at seeing their tiny wobbling shapes of about 1 micron or one millionth of a meter in size which I find to be quite fascinating. I also grew a protozoa culture simply by gathering up some dry leaves, soil and eggs and mixing them with water. Hay or grass clippings obviously weren't available as I did it in the middle of the winter. I put the culture in a small quart sized container. I was amazed to observe a lot of ciliate protozoa at around 50 microns in diameter swimming around vigorously along with a lot of much smaller bacteria. Now, when I looked at those extremely tiny microscopic organisms I am very well aware of the fact that for most of the vast majority of the history of life going back to around 3.5 billion years to the origin of life in the Precambrian era, for the immensely long stretch of some 3 to 2.5 billion years, those extremely tiny prokaryotic cellular organisms were in fact, the only life forms present on the completely barren land massed Earth in the shallow freshwater and saltwater bodies of the Earth. Any contemporary human somehow transported to that vast era as depicted in a science fiction time portal would find the entire surface of the Earth apparently devoid of any life at all and would require the assistance of a modern microscope device which was only invented less than 400 years ago back in Holland in the 17th century to actually observe any life at all as tiny one micron sized bacteria. About a month ago in early March 2018, I also mail ordered from a biological supply company, a small container of blue/green algae or cyanobacteria which in fact I never saw before in my life. Of course I kept a 15 gallon aquarium as a in the 1970s and a 55 gallon aquarium from March 1986 to July 1993 in which a major problem was having to scrape off the growth of green algae off the sides of the tank wall glass. That green algae was composed of eukaryotic green plant cells similar to the eukaryotic cells of our own bodies. But blue/green algae which first evolved some 1.5 billion years ago is actually a prokaryotic bacterial like form of plant life. When that life form first evolved on Earth a couple of billion years ago, it used the chemical process of producing glucose sugar from carbon dioxide and water which we call photosynthesis from sunlight as a source of food. That photosynthesis process produced free oxygen gas as a waste product which in fact is a very chemically reactive gas not natural to be in the Earth's atmosphere as anyone who has ever observing iron objects rusting or a fire burning. That free oxygen gas was actually a deadly poison to the vast majority of then extant what we would call anaerobic bacteria then living on Earth and most of the them became extinct, and a few managed to survive and still do in regions of the Earth not exposed to the atmosphere as deep in the oceans and freshwater bodies of the Earth or deep underground in the soil. Some of familiar to the layman as causing tetanus and botulism poisoning in humans. But the bacteria left of the Earth's surface exposed to the atmosphere which survived, evolved a tolerance and use for oxygen gas in respiration and are now what we would call aerobic bacteria which eventually evolved into more advanced eukaryotic cells called protozoa which eventually evolved into us humans a billion and a half years later. Actually aerobic metabolism using oxygen gas is far more efficient than anaerobic metabolism and yields something like 19 times the amount of energy carrying molecules in cells. In addition to observing bacteria and protozoa with a microscope I have also observed microscopic invertebrates including rotifers and tiny annelid worms. I also looked at tiny insects. Actually when you are doing that you begin to realize that on the absolute size scale of living things, we human beings are in fact really immensely large multicellular organisms. For the vast majority of the Earth's existence all the life present was only microscopic and completely invisible to naked eye observation. It was only in the Cambrian era starting some 600 million years ago in the event called the Cambrian Explosion that the first primitive multicellular organisms started to evolve most of which were extremely tiny at first at less than one inch in length. I have often read about and saw on television about a famous fossil site of the organisms of that era called the Burgess Shale located off the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, Canada which includes a lot of fossils of weird looking marine organisms most of which didn't survive and were the failed experiments of evolution. The major animal phyla which came out of it and survived to this day were the Chordata or vertebrates, the arthropods, the mollusks, annelid worms and a lot of other minor ones. The familiar present day jellyfish, sea anemones, hydras and coral organisms are of the phyla, the coelenterates which have a much more simple body design than the vertebrates, arthropods, etc. The ides that germs cause diseases in humans and other animals and plants wasn't actually realized until a mere 400 years ago in the 17th century or so when the first primitive microscopes were invented in Holland which were about to observe protozoa, bacteria and other organisms which were originally called "animalcules". Viruses which cause the common cold, measles, smallpox, polio, A.I.D.S. are other dreadful human diseases are actually not really complete living organisms but in fact giant protein and nucleic acid molecules which are too small to be able to observe with a light microscope which only magnifies at the most 1200x and a much more powerful electron microscope is needed which is also able to observe the intricate organelle cellular structure of our body cells. A few days ago, I placed the small amount of cyanobacteria I mail ordered into a much larger two quart plastic container full of aged tap water and I was surprised to observe that it appears to be thriving exposed to full sunlight on a kitchen windowsill. I attended S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook on Long Island from 1977 to 1981 and majored in biology but didn't graduate. In 1980 and 1981 I took courses in cell biology and biochemistry. I found biochemistry to be very interesting as it involves the process of nucleic acid or DNA and RNA molecule replication taking place in cells and the gene operan system mainly studied in prokaryotic bacterial cells which is how the genes which regulate glucose sugar metabolism will operate. Earlier than that in 1977 and 1979 I took chemistry and organic chemistry which explain that there are 92 naturally occurring chemical elements in the universe and all the chemical reactions involve the various changes in the orbital electron shells of the atoms. I find it very interesting to know that for a microscopic bacterial cell about 1 micron in size, the atoms of which it is composed in comparison to its size are still extremely tiny as we humans are in comparison to tiny particles of dust we observe as atoms are in the size of Angstroms or 1 x 10^-10 meter or one ten millionth of the length of a millimeter which we humans can observe as an extremely tiny notch seen on a metric ruler. If you look at the history of the duration of the life on Earth since the origin of life is speculated to have first started something like 3. 5 billion years ago after the end of cometary and meteor bombardment when the surface environment of the Earth became relatively stable, the very first life forms were would we would consider very tiny microscopic prokaryotic bacterial cells more primitive than anything found on Earth today. Actually, the basic definition of what life is exactly is a three nucleic acid coding system of a DNA molecule strand with instructions for a peptide or protein molecule polymer of amino acids. Then the proteins in the cell cytoplasm act as what are called enzymes which catalyze or facilitate chemical reactions which are the metabolism of the cell. One common misconception is we contemporary humans tend to think of the lifeforms on Earth as being relatively large easy to observe multicellular plants and animals when in fact for most of the immense length of the history of the life stretching from perhaps 3.5 billion to about 700 million years ago virtually all the life present on Earth consisted of microscopic single celled bacteria and then protozoans and algae. No life at all would be visible to casual naked eye observation except in the form of stromalite formations built up by colonies of microscopic bacteria. The life on Earth is classified as being in several kingdoms starting with very primitive prokaryotic bacteria which are divided separately further based on the way they operate biochemically. Then there are more advanced eukaryotic single celled protozoa and algae after that the much larger multicellular fungi, plants and animals. Actually, the vast majority of the total biosphere of of the over 99% consists entirely of green plants and bacteria. The fungi and animals are a mere less than 1%. In fact, all of the 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is produced entirely by the photosynthesis and all of the nitrogen atoms present in the amino acids of the proteins of all the life on Earth is fixed from the 80% atmospheric nitrogen by the biochemical activity of anaerobic bacteria present in the soil and water bodies of the Earth           |
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