-
Asked by anon-181914 on 13 Jun 2018.
Question: What is your favourite microbe?
- Keywords:
-
Lauren Burns answered on 13 Jun 2018:
I don’t really have a ‘favourite’, but I do think viruses and bacteria are pretty interesting!
-
Liza Selley answered on 13 Jun 2018:
I really like a species of bacteria call S. aureus. I use it to study whether air pollution causes infections in the lung. By adjusting the bacteria’s DNA I can make the S.aureus glow. This makes it easy to count in lung cells under the microscope.
A fun fact is that aureus means ‘golden’ in latin and S.aureus grows as a golden splodge in a petri dish 🙂
-
-
Ashley Akbari answered on 14 Jun 2018:
Cannot say i have a favourite, but yeast is a pretty common and useful one
-
Claire Donald answered on 14 Jun 2018:
My job is to study microbes so I know lots of interesting ones. I guess I would have to pick Zika virus as that is what I’m working on just now. It was discovered in the 1950s but didn’t really do anything. Then all of a sudden it appeared again in 2015 and made thousands of people sick and we still don’t really know why.
-
-
Joey Shepherd answered on 14 Jun 2018:
I’m a microbiologist so I find them all pretty fascinating! I’ve always been interested in types of microbes called ‘extremophiles’ which can live in really inhospitable environments on Earth, such as places with very high or low temperatures, pressures or salt concentrations. They are useful in part for studying how life could potentially exist on other planets!
One of my specific favourites though which isn’t an extremophile is a bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It can zip about swimming through liquids, and it’s actually the cause of a lot of infections and disease so it’s interesting to study.
Comments
anon-181914 commented on :
Thank you people you really helped me I’m going to ask more questions