23 Enthralling Facts About Microbes That’ll Surprise You – Part 2

Bacteria are becoming more tolerant of hand sanitizers, but regular hand washing with soap is the best solution. It is the physical action of lifting and moving them off your skin, and letting them run down the drain which they can’t become more tolerant to.

The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus is so infectious that one man in Hong Kong infected 183 people in 8 apartment buildings with one horrific bowel movement, causing a plume of aerosolized feces to circulate through the ventilation system and outside on the wind.

Gut bacteria could very well be manipulating our minds to cause cravings for certain foods they need in order to stay fit such as lipids and sugars.

Scientists recently discovered giant viruses (as big as 1 μm in length), named Pandoraviruses. Because more than 93% of their genes resemble nothing known and their origin cannot be traced back to any known cellular lineage, scientists suggest the existence of the 4th domain of life.

In 2017, Canadian scientists recreated an extinct horse pox virus to demonstrate that the smallpox virus can be recreated in a small lab at a cost of about $100,000, by a team of scientists without specialist knowledge.

The dangerous strains of E-Coli Bacteria only came into existence in the early 70s, when, by a freak event of DNA sharing, an E-Coli Bacterium gained the gene to produce kidney and intestine destroying Shiga Toxins from a Shigella Bacterium, the bacteria that causes Dysentery.

A giant virus has been discovered which has its own immune system. French scientists found that the defense mechanisms of these giant viruses work in a similar way to the CRISPR-Cas system, whereby the virus learns to recognize invaders, capture their genetic material, and use this information to destroy them.

Certain bacteria such as Bacillus pasteurii, Bacillus pseudofirmus, Bacillus cohnii, Sporosarcina pasteuri can be used to increase the strength of concrete by incorporating them into concrete mixture.

Dormant viruses can reactivate during spaceflight. Herpesviruses reactivate in more than half of the crew aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions.

The Yersinia pestis bacteria is responsible for 3 plague pandemics in history, i.e., Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, the Black Death in the 14th century, and the Third Pandemic in the 19th and 20th century.