Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep biosphere of the earth’s crust. Only bacteria and some archaea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin. In humans and most animals, the largest number of bacteria exist in the gut, and a large number on the skin.
About Bacteria in brief
Bacteria are among the first life forms to appear on Earth. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep biosphere of the earth’s crust. Only bacteria and some archaea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin. Vitamin B12 is a water-soluble vitamin that is involved in the metabolism of every cell of the human body. In humans and most animals, the largest number of bacteria exist in the gut, and a large number on the skin. The vast majority of bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of the immune system, though many are beneficial. Several species of bacteria are pathogenic and cause infectious diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy, and bubonic plague. The most common fatal bacterial diseases are respiratory infections. Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections and are also used in farming, making antibiotic resistance a growing problem. In industry, bacteria are important in sewage treatment and the breakdown of oil spills, the production of cheese and yogurt through fermentation, the recovery of gold, palladium, copper and other metals in the mining sector, as well as in biotechnology. There are approximately 5×1030 bacteria on Earth, forming a biomass which is only exceeded by plants. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles.
The word bacteria is the plural of the New Latin bacterium, which is the latinisation of the Greek βακτήρία, meaning staff, cane. The ancestors of modern bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear in Earth, about 4 billion years ago. For about 3billion years, most microscopic, stromatolites, bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms ofLife. However, studies indicate that bacteria diverged from the archaealeukaryotic lineage about 2.3–5 billion years ago. The earliest life on land may have been some 22 billion years ago, with bacteria also diverging in the second great evolutionary divergence, that involved the divergence of archaeukaryotons and eukarotons. The first common ancestor of bacteria and Archaea was probably a hyperthermophile that lived about 2–3–3 billion–years ago. The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology, and can be done in the University of California, San Diego, or in the UK at Kings College, London, or elsewhere. The term bacteria traditionally included all prokaryote, but the scientific classification changed after the discovery in the 1990s that proKaryotes consist of two very different groups of organisms that evolved from an ancient common ancestor. Once regarded as plants constituting the class Schizomycetes, bacteria are now classified as prokARYotes.
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This page is based on the article Bacteria published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
