You are searching for life in extreme environments. You collect samples from two different settings: hot volcanic ash and a glacier. Luckily, you discover a new species of bacteria in one of your samples. However, you messed up and accidently forgot to label your samples, so you don’t know which environment it
Microbial Physiology
Microbial physiology is the branch of microbiology that is associated with studying the physiology of fungi, bacteria, and viruses. It is an important field of science concerning functional genomics and metabolic engineering.
Chemotaxis
The organism’s movement in a particular direction as a response to certain chemicals that are available in the environment is defined as chemotaxis. In brief, it can be defined as the occurrence of an organism’s movement in response to a certain chemical stimulus.
You are searching for life in extreme environments. You collect samples from two different settings: hot volcanic ash and a glacier. Luckily, you discover a new species of bacteria in one of your samples. However, you messed up and accidently forgot to label your samples, so you don’t know which environment it was from!
You study the lipids from the membrane of the new bacterial species. You find that the membrane phospholipids contain a high amount of saturated fatty acids and fatty acids with long carbon chains. Was your bacterial isolate from the hot volcanic ash or the glacier? Explain why you picked that environment, using two pieces of evidence from the provided information about the bacteria’s membrane lipids to support your answer.
In a cell degree of saturation of fatty acids determine the membrane fluidity. Cell membrane is made up of phospholipid bilayer and proteins. The phospholipid bilayer is either made up of saturated or unsaturated fatty acids. Saturated fatty acids contain only single bonds whereas unsaturated fatty acids which contain one or more double bonds.
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