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In comparison to batch culture, bacteria are maintained in exponential growth phase, and the growth rate of the bacteria is known. Related devices include turbidostats and auxostats . When Escherichia coli is growing very slowly with a doubling time of 16 hours in a chemostat most cells have a single chromosome.
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.
Most commonly apparent in species that reproduce quickly and asexually, like bacteria, exponential growth is intuitive from the fact that each organism can divide and produce two copies of itself. Each descendent bacterium can itself divide, again doubling the population size (as displayed in the above graph). [ 2 ]
Bacteria grow to a fixed size and then reproduce through binary fission, a form of asexual reproduction. [114] Under optimal conditions, bacteria can grow and divide extremely rapidly, and some bacterial populations can double as quickly as every 17 minutes. [115] In cell division, two identical clone daughter cells are produced. Some bacteria ...
An infection is the invasion of tissues by pathogens, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agent and the toxins they produce. [1] An infectious disease, also known as a transmissible disease or communicable disease, is an illness resulting from an infection.
Improper processing or storage can allow bacteria to grow and produce dangerous toxins. Signs of contamination, such as unusual odors, changes in texture, or bulging cans (also known as "bombage"), indicate food spoilage and should be disposed. [80] Preventing gas gangrene involves taking precautions to avoid bacterial infections.
Bacteria can survive under diverse environmental conditions and in order to overcome these adverse and changing conditions, bacteria must sense the changes and mount appropriate responses in gene expression and protein activity. The stress response in bacteria involves a complex network of elements that counteracts the external stimulus.
This enables the microbes to rapidly proliferate, far in excess of the immune system's capability to defend, as prokaryotic bacteria possess a far greater capacity for multiplication than the host's immune system. The combination of bacterial load and ability to multiply is the basis for the microbes' ability to cause massive infection.