Question: what type of bactieia

Blanka Sengerova answered on 28 Jun 2012:

I’m not sure you the question is quite complete but perhaps I can expand it to ‘what type of bacteria there are?’. Bacteria is a term for a huge number of different organisms, very simple single-celled ones. It is a bit like saying ‘what type of animals are there?’ because there is a huge range of them.

As I said, bacteria are single-celled organisms that evolved much earlier than the big animals and plants (multi-cellular organisms) that are around the Earth now. There are many different types of them and they can be classified based on what they feed on, where they live (some can survive in extreme environments such as the deep see vents at the bottom of the sea) or even how they get their energy (some can get their energy from the sun by photosynthesis like plants do, others need to absorb nutrients from the environment). Some bacteria are ‘good for us’ in that they happily live in our guts, for instance, and do not cause any harm to us and can even be beneficial by helping us digest what we eat. Others are toxic and these are the ones you often hear about.

Interestingly, we have only studied the bacteria that we can culture in the lab and it is thought that this is a tiny minority of bacterial species that actually exist.

Does this partly answer your question?