MICROBIOLOGY

COLLEGE PHYSICS
Chapter 1:
Chapter # Chapter Title
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AN INVISIBLE WORLD
 Dr. Richard Middleton: Background
 Academic Training
 Allegheny College-BS in Biology and Chemistry-Joint Major
 Washington University Medical School-PhD- Neuroscience
 Post-doctoral training at Brandeis University added cell biology,
molecular biology and electrophysiology
Research Fellow at Merck in Rahway NJ
 Developed several novel cell based assays focused on ion channels as drug targets
Senior Research Fellow at Merck in Boston
 Led automated assay development and screening efforts for oncology
 Group leader in neurophysiology for Alzheimer's disease
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
 Leader of the assay development group (several kinases and histone modifiers)
 Project lead for several Merck and Sanofi external collaborative research projects
 Attendance and Introductions

1. Your major or primary interest in this

course
2. Years at MCC
3. Career goal
Syllabus review-Need Lab Coat!

Blackboard

https://openstax.org/

Microbiology
Nina Parker et. al.
Chapter 1 Overview and History of
Microbiology - No Homework
• Microorganisms = microbes
• They are living organisms too small to be
seen with the unaided eye.

Some of the topics covered in Microbiology

will include “nonliving” things (or
acellular) and visible organisms.
 What out Ancestors Knew
• Used fermentation for preservation and
enhance to the taste of food
• Fermentation would produce alcohol,
gases and organic acids
• Sick people were quarantined in biblical
time to present spread of disease
• Ancient Greeks attributed disease to
“ bad air” mal’ aria
 Yeast Fermentation

Microscopic view of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast

responsible for making bread rise (left).
Yeast is a microorganism and metabolize the carbohydrates
in flour (middle)
Produces CO2, which causes the bread to rise (right).
The Cloaca Maxima, or “Greatest Sewer”
Romans built giant
fresh water aqueducts
and wastewater
removal to help
prevent disease
Hippocrates (460 BC)
first to posit diseases
had natural causes
Thucydides first to
notice survivors unable
to be re-infected
 Some early “scientists” in microbiology

(a)Hippocrates, the “father of Western medicine,”

(b)The historian Thucydides observed that survivors of the Athenian
plague were subsequently immune to the infection.
(c)Marcus Terentius Varro proposed that disease could be caused by
“certain minute creatures . . . which cannot be seen by the eye.”
History of Microbiology: 1600s
Robert Hooke
• 1st to see cells in plant cork
• Cell theory: all living things
composed of cells.
Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek
•1st to see live
microbes under a
microscope
(animacules)
 The Birth of Microbiology

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) is credited with numerous innovations

that advanced the fields of microbiology and immunology
including pasteurization and vaccines for rabies
Robert Koch (1843–1910) identified the specific microbes that
cause anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis.
Science of Taxonomy and Nomenclature
• 1735 Carolus Linnaeus
• Developed a new system
for categorizing plants and
animals
• Binomial system

Genus species or Genus

species
G. species or G. species
Ex. Homo sapiens
 The Tree of Life

• Ernst Haeckel’s rendering of the tree of life, from his 1866 book
General Morphology of Organisms,
• Contained three kingdoms: Plantae, Protista, and Animalia.
• Divided into Kingdom, class, order, family, genus and species
• He later added a fourth kingdom, Monera, for unicellular
organisms lacking a nucleus. (now called prokaryotes)
 Timeline for the evolution of the tree of life

• The taxonomy of living organisms is continually being

reevaluated and refined with advances in technology……..
EVEN TODAY especially for microorganisms.
• Today mostly rely on genetic, biochemical and
embryological comparisons
 Woes and Fox’s Genetic’s based tree of life

• Domains Archaea and Bacteria contain all prokaryotic organisms,

• Eukarya contains all eukaryotic organisms.
• Added Archaea, closer association to Eukarya
• Horizontal gene transfer common in microorganisms confounds
evolutionary trees making more of a web of life
 Three Domains
1. Bacteria
2. Archaea Prokaryotes
3. Eukaryotes
a. Fungi-Yes
b. Protists-Yes
c. Animals-No
d. Plants-No
In microbiology we’ll also study some
nonliving things-viruses & prions
 Interactive Tree of Life
http://www.wellcometreeoflife.org/interactive/
Relative sizes of various microscopic and
nonmicroscopic objects

Note that a typical virus measures about 100 nm, 10 times smaller
than a typical bacterium (~1 μm), which is at least 10 times smaller
than a typical plant or animal cell (~10–100 μm).
An object must measure about 100 μm to be visible without a
microscope.
 Units of Length Commonly Used in Microbiology
Metric Unit Meaning of Prefix Metric Equivalent
meter (m) — 1 m = 100 m
decimeter (dm) 1/10 1 dm = 0.1 m = 10−1 m
centimeter (cm) 1/100 1 cm = 0.01 m = 10−2 m
millimeter (mm) 1/1000 1 mm = 0.001 m = 10−3 m
micrometer (μm) 1/1,000,000 1 μm = 0.000001 m = 10−6
m
nanometer (nm) 1/1,000,000,000 1 nm = 0.000000001 m =
10−9 m
 Relative Sizes
https://www.cellsalive.com/howbig_js.htm
 Types of microorganisms

Prokaryotes = pre (before) nucleus.

Both Bacteria & Archaea

 NO NUCLEUS, NO membrane bound organelles, but

do have DNA, ribosomes
 Unicellular
 Reproduce by binary fission (asexual,
no mitosis since no nucleus)
Bacteria: (usually)
- Peptidoglycan in the cell wall

Archaea:
- Little cell wall w/o peptidoglycan
- Have proteins called S-layers
with glycans attached
- A few Archaea appear to have no
cell wall
 Common bacterial shapes

 Bacteria often described based on their shapes

 Found in nearly every environment
 Most are harmless, but some cause disease (pathogens)
 Coccobacillus is a combination of spherical (coccus) and
rod-shaped (bacillus)
 Archaea Types
•Extreme halophiles
- Live in high salt
- Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea

•Extreme thermophiles
- High heat (hot springs, volcanoes)
- Very cold (South pole ice)
Archaea can live in extreme environments

A hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. The color

differences in the pool result from the different
communities of microbes that are able to thrive at
various water temperatures.
 Eukaryotic microorganisms
Protists-Informal grouping, not plant, animal
or fungi, includes Algae & Protozoans
Protozoans
a. Unicellular
b. Live in H2O, blood
c. Some are parasites: derive nutrition from
living host/some pathogenic
Plasmodium (malaria)
Giardia lamblia, an intestinal protozoan

Parasite that infects

humans and other
mammals, causing
severe diarrhea.
 Algae
a. Photosynthetic, but extremely diverse
b. Majority are microscopic (unicellular),
others multicellular
c. Live in H2O (salt & fresh)

Seaweed is a type
of Algae
Assorted diatoms, a kind of algae

Diatoms range in size from 2 μm to 200 μm and

are visualized here using light microscopy
 Other Eukaryotes
1. Bacteria
2. Archaea
3. Eukaryotes = true nucleus
A. Fungi (mycology) (kingdom)
a. cell wall has chitin
- yeast = unicellular
- molds, mushrooms = multicellular
 Fungi
Eukaryotes
1. sexual & asexual reproduction
2. unicellular (yeast)
3. multicellular (molds, mushrooms)
4. true fungi- cell wall has chitin

• Visible masses = mycelium

• Long filaments which make up the mycelium =
hyphae

• Largest fungi: mushrooms

 Candida albicans is a unicellular fungus (yeast)

• Causative agent of vaginal yeast infections & oral thrush

• C. albicans has a morphology similar to that of coccus
bacteria; however, yeast is a eukaryotic organism (note
the nuclei) and is much larger
Large colonies of microscopic fungi can often be observed
with the naked eye, as seen on the surface of these moldy
oranges.
 Helminths
Not technically a microbe
-: parasitic flat/ round worms.
a) No cell walls, like animal cells
b) Some life cycle stages (eggs and larvae)
are microscopic and can be a human
pathogen, why covered in microbiology
ex: tape, pinworms
 Some Helminths

(a)The beef tapeworm, Taenia saginata, infects both cattle and

humans. T. saginata eggs are microscopic (around 50 μm), but adult
worms can reach 4–10 m, taking up residence in the digestive
system.
(b)An adult guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis, is removed through
a lesion in the patient’s skin by winding it around a matchstick.
 Nonliving or acelluar pathogens
 Viruses- DNA or RNA viruses
a. Consist of protein,
nucleic acid
b. Parasites

Prions-
a. Proteinaceous infectious particles
b. Mad cow, kuru,
Creutzfeldt-Jakob,
fatal familial insomnia
 Images of Viruses

(a) Members of the Coronavirus family can cause respiratory infections

like the common cold, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS),
and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Viewed by a
transmission electron microscope (TEM).
(b) Ebolavirus as visualized using a TEM.
Questions?
Figure 1.7

(a) This Petri dish filled with agar has been streaked with Legionella, the bacterium responsible for
causing Legionnaire’s disease.
(b) An inoculation loop like this one can be used to streak bacteria on agar in a Petri dish. (credit a:
modification of work by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; credit b: modification of
work by Jeffrey M. Vinocur)