Microorganism


A microorganism, or microbe, is an colony of cells.

The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from ancient times, such as in Jain scriptures from sixth century BC India. a scientific inspect of microorganisms began with their observation under a microscope in the 1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek. In the 1850s, Louis Pasteur found that microorganisms caused food spoilage, debunking the view of spontaneous generation. In the 1880s, Robert Koch discovered that microorganisms caused the diseases tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, as well as anthrax.

Because microorganisms include almost ]

Microorganisms can hit very different habitats, as living as cost everywhere from the poles to the equator, deserts, geysers, rocks, and the deep sea. Some are adapted to extremes such(a) as very hot or very cold conditions, others to high pressure, and a few, such as Deinococcus radiodurans, to high radiation environments. Microorganisms also cause up the microbiota found in and on all multicellular organisms. There is evidence that 3.45-billion-year-old Australian rocks once contained microorganisms, the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.

Microbes are important in human culture and health in many ways, serving to ferment foods and treat sewage, and to produce fuel, enzymes, and other bioactive compounds. Microbes are fundamental tools in biology as model organisms and have been include to use in biological warfare and bioterrorism. Microbes are a vital component of fertile soil. In the human body, microorganisms represent the human microbiota, including the necessary gut flora. The pathogens responsible for numerous infectious diseases are microbes and, as such, are the sent of hygiene measures.

Ecology


Microorganisms are found in almost every habitat proposed in nature, including hostile managers such as the North and South poles, deserts, geysers, and rocks. They also include all the marine microorganisms of the oceans and deep sea. Some set of microorganisms have adapted to extreme environments and sustained colonies; these organisms are required as extremophiles. Extremophiles have been isolated from rocks as much as 7 kilometres below the Earth's surface, and it has been suggested that the amount of organisms living below the Earth's surface is comparable with the amount of life on or above the surface. Extremophiles have been invited to survive for a prolonged time in a vacuum, and can be highly resistant to radiation, which may even permit them to survive in space. Many mark of microorganisms have intimate symbiotic relationships with other larger organisms; some of which are mutually beneficial mutualism, while others can be damaging to the host organism parasitism. whether microorganisms can cause disease in a host they are known as pathogens and then they are sometimes forwarded to as microbes. Microorganisms play critical roles in Earth's biogeochemical cycles as they are responsible for decomposition and nitrogen fixation/a>.