Expérience publique

Bacteria

Bacteria are microscopic, single-celled organisms that thrive in diverse environments. These organisms can live in soil, the ocean, and inside the human gut. Humans' relationship with bacteria is complex. Sometimes bacteria lend us a helping hand, such as by curdling milk into yogurt or helping with our digestion. Bacteria (singular: bacterium) are classified as prokaryotes, which are single-celled organisms with a simple internal structure that lacks a nucleus, and contains DNA that either floats freely in a twisted, thread-like mass called the nucleoid, or in separate, circular pieces called plasmids. Ribosomes are the spherical units in the bacterial cell where proteins are assembled from individual amino acids using the information encoded in ribosomal RNA.