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Microbiology

Microbiologists have made many fundamental contributions to biology, especially in the fields of biochemistry, genetics, and cell biology. Microbes have many traits that make them ideal model organisms:

• They are small, therefore they do not consume many resources
• Some have very short generation times (~30 minutes for E. coli)
• Cells can easily survive in isolation from other cells
• They can reproduce by mitotic division, allowing for the propagation of genetically identical (clonal) populations.
• They may be frozen for long periods of time. Even if 90% of the cells are killed by the freezing process, there are millions of cells in a milliliter of liquid culture.

The extensive characterization of microbes has allowed them to be used as tools in other branches of biology:

• Bacteria (especially E. coli) may be used to replicate DNA in the form of a plasmid. This DNA is often chemically modified in vitro then inserted into bacteria to select for the desired traits and isolate the desired product from by-products of the reaction. After growing the bacteria and thereby replicating the DNA, the DNA may be further modified and inserted into other organisms.
• Bacteria may be used to produce large amounts of protein using genes encoded on a plasmid
• Bacterial genes have been inserted into other organisms as reporter genes.
• The yeast two-hybrid system combines bacterial genes with genes from the organism being studied and inserts them into yeast cells to study protein-protein interactions within a cellular environment.

• Online Microbiology textbook

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