Why is identifying Bacteria important?

Why is identifying Bacteria important?

Bacteria are prokaryotes which are available in large numbers of various kinds. They are of different sizes, shapes, rods, spheres and spirals. They can inhabit almost every place on earth like soil, hot springs that are acidic, radioactive waste, in water, deep in crust of earth, in organic matter, and in the bodies of live animals and plants. The bacteria exist in large numbers like 40 million in a gram of the soil, millions of bacteria in 1 ml of fresh water, approximately five nonillion bacteria on earth. The bacteria are formed as a huge biomass of organisms that might exceed the number of plants and animals.

There are various different groups of bacteria where one group consists of chlorophyll which makes use of photosynthesis to prepare its own food. Some of the bacteria live in mutual association with the plants like Rhizobium bacteria. Rhizobium lives inside the roots of leguminous plants and develop mutual symbiotic association with the plant roots at the places called as root nodules. Some bacteria are parasites that survive in the animals, man and in some plants causing diseases. The various diseases that are caused by the bacteria due to the release of the toxins by them inside the cells made it necessary to identify the bacteria.

Some bacteria are aerobic and some are anaerobic. Some travel in air, some in water and some through any object from one hand to the hand of other people. They travel in the medium with the help of flagella or by wriggling. The bacteria that are living inside the living organisms cause lot of discomfort in them. The bacteria also eat away the chemicals in the body of organism it infects and break down the chemicals. Various groups of bacteria carry out different processes in the body to generate symptoms of the disease. So, it is necessary to identify the bacteria and find out to which class it belongs to. This makes us to study its etiology which helps us to select correct medication to cure or prevent the disease symptoms caused by them.