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Microbial metabolism is the means by which a microbe obtains the energy and nutrients (e.g. carbon) it needs to live and reproduce.Microbes use many different types of metabolic strategies and species can often be differentiated from each other based on metabolic characteristics.
Bacterial motility is the ability of bacteria to move independently using metabolic energy. Most motility mechanisms that evolved among bacteria also evolved in parallel among the archaea. Most rod-shaped bacteria can move using their own power, which allows colonization of new environments and discovery of new resources for survival.
[200] [201] Referred to as "normal flora", [202] or "commensals", [203] these bacteria usually cause no harm but may occasionally invade other sites of the body and cause infection. Escherichia coli is a commensal in the human gut but can cause urinary tract infections. [ 204 ]
However, many bacterial species can transfer DNA between individual cells by a horizontal gene transfer process referred to as natural transformation. [56] Some species form extraordinarily resilient spores , but for bacteria this is a mechanism for survival, not reproduction.
The two components of the proton-motive force are thermodynamically equivalent: In mitochondria, the largest part of energy is provided by the potential; in alkaliphile bacteria the electrical energy even has to compensate for a counteracting inverse pH difference.
Biological thermodynamics (Thermodynamics of biological systems) is a science that explains the nature and general laws of thermodynamic processes occurring in living organisms as nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems that convert the energy of the Sun and food into other types of energy. The nonequilibrium thermodynamic state of living ...
Knallgas bacteria stand out from other hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria that, although using H 2 as energy source, are not able to fix CO 2, as Knallgas do. [ 27 ] This aerobic hydrogen oxidation (H 2 + O 2 {\displaystyle \longrightarrow } H 2 O), also known as the Knallgas reaction, releases a considerable amount of energy, having a ΔG o of –237 ...
The heliobacteria are phototrophic: they convert light energy into chemical energy using a type I reaction center. [6] [7] The primary pigment involved is bacteriochlorophyll g, which is unique to the group and has a unique absorption spectrum; this gives the heliobacteria their own environmental niche. [5]