Microbes are special with unique abilities that tip them as superior to humans.
Let's take E. coli as an example, a unique microbe that caught the eye of a German bacteriologist called Theodore Escherich, thanks to its gift of multiplication- the way in which a single microbe can give rise to an astonishingly stupendous growth in a matter of hours.
Escherich discovered that if E. coli had continued to reproduce at such rate, a single microbial cell that is placed inside a flask would grow massively and in a matter of days, a visible microbial mass would have filled the flask.
They could possibly fill up the earth, but E. coli did something else. It began to grow slowly and within a day, it stopped growing.
Every living thing, humans for example can choose to increase, multiply and fill the whole earth, at least theoretically. But we do not as at some point, the exponential growth of a species quickly slams into the harsh reality of this finite world.
As the population of E. coli grows denser, the bacteria consume oxygen at a tremendous rate faster than fresh supplies can arrive, their wastes build up, making their surroundings toxic. E. coli can no longer get food adequately and runs out of essential nutrients. Its ribosome gets sloppy, producing misshapen proteins that attacks its other molecules. This disastrous event can ripple out across the entire microbe. What a fatal collision with reality!
To continue its growth in this condition would be suicidal, like driving a car off a bridge. Microbes must survive and they strive with their might to do so. Instead of jumping over a bridge, E. coli slams the break! and in a matter of seconds, it enters a living dead mode.
It stops reading its genes and destroys all the proteins that it is in the midst of building. Struggling to survive, it makes proteins to defend itself against stress and other forms of insult threatening its survival.
To keep dangerous molecules from slipping in through the membrane and to prevent the beneficial ones from slipping out, it closes its pores. To protect its DNA, it folds it into a crystalline structure.
All these struggle to survive demand a great deal of energy but since it has limited food to supply energy, E. coli eats itself! dismantling its own energy rich molecules, even cannibalizing its ribosome and can no longer make new proteins.
The menaces faced by the starving E. coli are similar to those faced by our own cells as we get old. Aging human cells suffer the same sorts of damage in their genes and chromosomes and proteins get deformed in much the same way some proteins in starving E. coli are deformed.
Life does not only grow and reproduce, it decays as well. Although microorganisms and humans face the same ravaging conditions, microbe emerge the winner.
In the case of E. coli, something interesting could happen. If you pluck out a single E. coli from that stationary phase and place it in a flask of fresh growth medium, life sparks back into it. It will unpack its folded DNA, build new proteins and resume its life with stately grace, continuing to grow and reproduce as if nothing happened. A second chance to life!
This is why scientists can leave a colony of microbes in a stationary phase for years and still get to resuscitate some viable microbial cells.
Good thing for microbes but for humans, we never get that second chance.
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