SMK KUALA KUBU

BHARU

BACTERIA
&
VIRUSES
NAME : nur shahira binti abdul rauf
CLASS : 5 sastera ikhtisas
I/C : 920908 - 14 - 6248
DEFINITION OF BACTERIA

Bacteria are part of a very large group of single-celled organisms. There is one
group of bacteria that have chlorophyll and use the process of photosynthesis to produce
their own food. Bacteria that are parasites live inside man, animals, and some plants
causing diseases. Symptoms for disease caused by the toxins that bacteria produce inside
the cells. Some bacteria are aerobic, meaning that they require oxygen in order to survive.
Other bacteria are anaerobes, meaning that they do not require oxygen to survive.
Bacteria is moved by air and water currents, and on any surface such as clothing, hands,
or any object. They move themselves by using thin hair-like structures called flagella or
by wriggling if they do not have a flagella.

The Bacteria are a large group of unicellular microorganisms. Typically a few

micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods
and spirals. Bacteria are ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot
springs, radioactive waste, water, and deep in the Earth's crust, as well as in organic
matter and the live bodies of plants and animals. There are typically 40 million bacterial
cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water; in all,
there are approximately five nonillion (5×1030) bacteria on Earth, forming much of the
world's biomass. Bacteria are vital in recycling nutrients, with many important steps in
nutrient cycles depending on these organisms, such as the fixation of nitrogen from the
atmosphere and putrefaction. However, most bacteria have not been characterized, and
only about half of the phyla of bacteria have species that can be cultured in the
laboratory. The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology.

There are approximately ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells in the
human body, with large numbers of bacteria on the skin and in the digestive tract. The
vast majority of the bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of
the immune system, and a few are beneficial. However, a few species of bacteria are
pathogenic and cause infectious diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy and
bubonic plague. The most common fatal bacterial diseases are respiratory infections, with
tuberculosis alone killing about 2 million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. In
developed countries, antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections and in various
agricultural processes, so antibiotic resistance is becoming common. In industry, bacteria
are important in processes such as sewage treatment, the production of cheese and
yoghurt through fermentation, as well as biotechnology, and the manufacture of
antibiotics and other chemicals.

Once regarded as plants constituting the class Schizomycetes, bacteria are now
classified as prokaryotes. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do
not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles. Although the term
bacteria traditionally included all prokaryotes, the scientific classification changed after
the discovery in the 1990s that prokaryotic life consists of two very different groups of
organisms that evolved independently from an ancient common ancestor. These
evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea.

Bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a

single-lens microscope of his own design. He called them "animalcules" and published
his observations in a series of letters to the Royal Society. The name bacterium was
introduced much later, by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in 1838.

Louis Pasteur demonstrated in 1859 that the fermentation process is caused by the
growth of microorganisms, and that this growth is not due to spontaneous generation.
(Yeasts and molds, commonly associated with fermentation, are not bacteria, but rather
fungi.) Along with his contemporary, Robert Koch, Pasteur was an early advocate of the
germ theory of disease. Robert Koch was a pioneer in medical microbiology and worked
on cholera, anthrax and tuberculosis. In his research into tuberculosis, Koch finally
proved the germ theory, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1905. In Koch's
postulates, he set out criteria to test if an organism is the cause of a disease; these
postulates are still used today.

Though it was known in the nineteenth century that bacteria are the cause of many
diseases, no effective antibacterial treatments were available. In 1910, Paul Ehrlich
developed the first antibiotic, by changing dyes that selectively stained Treponema
pallidum—the spirochaete that causes syphilis—into compounds that selectively killed
the pathogen. Ehrlich had been awarded a 1908 Nobel Prize for his work on immunology,
and pioneered the use of stains to detect and identify bacteria, with his work being the
basis of the Gram stain and the Ziehl-Neelsen stain.

A major step forward in the study of bacteria was the recognition in 1977 by Carl
Woese that archaea have a separate line of evolutionary descent from bacteria.This new
phylogenetic taxonomy was based on the sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA, and divided
prokaryotes into two evolutionary domains, as part of the three-domain system.
BENEFIT OF BACTERIA
DEFINITION OF VIRUSES

Infectious and parasitic microorganism much smaller than a bacterium, too small
to be seen with a regular microscope or to be trapped even by ceramic filters. A virus is
incapable of independent metabolic activity and replication, it must invade a live animal,
human, or plant cell from which to derive the energy for survival. For replication, the
virus provides only the genetic code and the invaded cell provides the raw material. The
growth of viruses disrupts the invaded cell's internal mechanism and it usually dies and
releases the viruses in the bloodstream. The invaded body's immune defenses react by
producing an antiviral protein (interferon) which halts the spread of viruses to other cells.
These defenses, however, sometimes are incapable of resisting the virus and are
overwhelmed resulting in a diseased body. Antibiotics are ineffective against viruses and
special types of drugs called vaccines (suspensions of attenuated or killed viruses) have
to be developed for each type of virus. Out of some 5000 known species of viruses, over
200 have been identified as disease causing (pathogenic) to humans. New ones, like
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in 1983 and SARS (Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003, appear suddenly and are often of animal origin. Some
other common human diseases caused by viruses are chickenpox, common cold, herpes,
influenza, mumps, measles, polio, rabies, rubella, and yellow fever. In 1971,
microorganism smaller than viruses (called 'viroids') were discovered which can cause
some rare diseases. In 1982, US neurologist Stanley Pruisner indicated the presence of a
particle (called 'prion') about 1/100th the size of a virus and responsible for Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) (see
mad cow disease for details), for which he won the year 2000 Nobel Prize for physiology.

A virus (from the Latin virus meaning toxin or poison) is a sub-microscopic

infectious agent that is unable to grow or reproduce outside a host cell. Viruses infect all
cellular life. The first known virus, tobacco mosaic virus, was discovered by Martinus
Beijerinck in 1899,[1] and now more than 5,000 types of virus have been described.[2] The
study of viruses is known as virology, and is a branch of microbiology.

Viruses consist of two or three parts: all viruses have genes made from either
DNA or RNA, long molecules that carry genetic information; all have a protein coat that
protects these genes; and some have an envelope of fat that surrounds them when they are
outside a cell. Viruses vary in shape from simple helical and icosahedral shapes, to more
complex structures. They are about 100 times smaller than bacteria.[3] The origins of
viruses are unclear: some may have evolved from plasmids—pieces of DNA that can
move between cells—others may have evolved from bacteria.
 Viruses spread in many ways; plant viruses are often transmitted from plant to
plant by insects that feed on sap, such as aphids, while animal viruses can be carried by
blood-sucking insects. These disease-bearing organisms are known as vectors. Influenza
viruses are spread by coughing and sneezing, and others such as norovirus, are
transmitted by the faecal-oral route, when they contaminate hands, food or water.
Rotaviruses are often spread by direct contact with infected children. HIV is one of
several viruses that are transmitted through sex.

Not all viruses cause disease, as many viruses reproduce without causing any
obvious harm to the infected organism. Some viruses such as HIV can cause life-long or
chronic infections, and the viruses continue to replicate in the body despite the hosts'
defence mechanisms. However, viral infections in animals usually cause an immune
response, which can completely eliminate a virus. These immune responses can also be
produced by vaccines that give lifelong immunity to a viral infection. Microorganisms
such as bacteria also have defences against viral infection, such as restriction
modification systems. Antibiotics have no effect on viruses, but antiviral drugs have been
developed to treat life-threatening and more minor infections.