Bright Lights, Abundant Operons—Fluorescence and Genomic Technologies Advance Studies of Bacterial Locomotion and Signal Transduction: Review of the BLAST Meeting
In the merciless world of natural selection, microorganisms have turned their most obvious characteristic, their small size, into their greatest advantage. Small size results in a large surface-to-volume ratio, which facilitates exchange of chemi-cals between the interior of bacterial cells and the...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2001
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.553.2189 http://tamar.tau.ac.il/~eshel/Bio_complexity/Biological Background/review-chemotaxis.pdf |
| Summary: | In the merciless world of natural selection, microorganisms have turned their most obvious characteristic, their small size, into their greatest advantage. Small size results in a large surface-to-volume ratio, which facilitates exchange of chemi-cals between the interior of bacterial cells and the external environment. The hallmark of prokaryotes (Archaea and Bacte-ria) is their metabolic diversity. Virtually every conceivable energy or nutrient source can be utilized by one microbial species or another, and viable microorganisms can be found practically any-where on our planet that one bothers to look, whether at the bottom of the ocean, on the frozen landscape of Antarctica, or a mile underground. One measure of the remarkable success of prokaryotes is that bacteria are conservatively estimated to out-number humans by an astronomical factor of at least 1021 (93). It is therefore not surprising that prokaryotes comprise the vast |
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