In a vain attempt to inject some science into this blog, I thought I might consider some popular "facts" about bacteria which appear in some science textbooks and are thus perpetuated as urban myths within the scientific community. The most popular one, which I'll start with is:
Bacteria have a singular, circular chromosome
Many bacteria, including the "model" bacterium Escherichia coli, that do have only one chromosome. However, there are numerically more bacteria in the world that have not one, or two, but many chromosomes. For example, Rhodobacter sphaeroides has two circular chromosomes, and Paracoccus pantotrophus has at least 4, one of which is linear. The possession of a linear chromosome isn't unusual. One of the most important organisms in biotechnology, Streptomyces coelicolor, has a single linear chromosome too.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment