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Schematic of typical Gram-positive cell wall showing arrangement of N-Acetylglucosamine and N-Acetylmuramic acid; Teichoic acids not shown.. The Gram-positive cell wall is characterized by the presence of a very thick peptidoglycan layer, which is responsible for the retention of the crystal violet dyes during the Gram staining procedure.
A number of other bacteria—that are bounded by a single membrane, but stain gram-negative due to either lack of the peptidoglycan layer, as in the mycoplasmas, or their inability to retain the Gram stain because of their cell wall composition—also show close relationship to the gram-positive bacteria.
Bacterial morphological plasticity refers to changes in the shape and size that bacterial cells undergo when they encounter stressful environments. Although bacteria have evolved complex molecular strategies to maintain their shape, many are able to alter their shape as a survival strategy in response to protist predators, antibiotics, the immune response, and other threats.
The cell wall of some Gram-positive bacteria can be completely dissolved by lysozymes which attack the bonds between N-acetylmuramic acid and N-acetylglucosamine. In other Gram-positive bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, the walls are resistant to the action of lysozymes. [4] They have O-acetyl groups on carbon-6 of some muramic acid ...
Examples of gram-positive diplococci are Streptococcus pneumoniae and Enterococcus spp. [10] [11] Presumably, diplococcus has been implicated in encephalitis lethargica. [12] The genus Neisseria belongs to the family Neisseriaceae. This genus, Neisseria, is divided into more than ten different species, but most of them are gram negative and ...
Bacteria can be classified on the basis of cell structure, cellular metabolism or on differences in cell components, such as DNA, fatty acids, pigments, antigens and quinones. [118] While these schemes allowed the identification and classification of bacterial strains, it was unclear whether these differences represented variation between ...
The decolorization step is critical and must be timed correctly; the crystal violet stain is removed from both gram-positive and negative cells if the decolorizing agent is left on too long (a matter of seconds). [19] After decolorization, the gram-positive cell remains purple and the gram-negative cell loses its purple color. [19]
In B. subtilis the length of transferred DNA is greater than 1,271 kb (more than 1 million bases). [32] The transferred DNA is likely double-stranded DNA and is often more than a third of the total chromosome length of 4,215 kb. [33] It appears that about 7–9% of the recipient cells take up an entire chromosome. [34]