0.001% of bacteria your soap doesn’t kill is basically the Superman of bacteria
I have jokingly said that for years about the marketing on soaps and nobody believed me. :)
Micro-evolution is absolutely crazy though. I started learning about that with fungi; mycelium specifically. Those little things can shift their genetics lightning fast. If they are exposed to different nutrient sources or growing conditions, life… uh… finds a way. There is a debate that is going on right now about the whole naming convention of fungi being broken since fruit characteristics aren’t telling a complete enough picture. While most strains of, say, pink oyster mushrooms can produce the exact same fruit they might have wildly different genetic markers while still behaving like they are from the same strain.
I think this was discovered when mycologists tried to import some mycelium into New Zealand. Different batches of mycelium were comming from the same exact strain and lineage but when it was tested for import, the genetics were too far off to match to a “legally importable” strain.
Genetic “drift” is well known. After duplicating the same strain over a number of years from petri dish to petri dish, the mycelium just adapts to a cheap and easy agar food source and its fruiting tendencies may suffer as a result. What is new, is how fast it can actually happen in the wild without it going through the genetic lottery of spore combination.
(Disclaimer: I am horrendously tired right now and I tend to jumble factoids in this state. Slap me if I got something horribly wrong.)
We saw it in real time, accidentally, in a microbiology class I took.
Lab final was basically “swab this mystery petri dish, run some tests, and tell me what it is”. So, start running different stains and indicator tests, result was eventually pretty clearly S. Aurius. Except it wasn’t. The thing that gave it away was a manitol digestion test, which S. Aurius pops positive for, but the other strain of S. ___ we tested for pop negative.
Everyone’s manitol test was positive, but the correct answer should have been S. Epidermidis.
Prof thought the test sample was contaminated, so he did an isolation swab on his own time… still a pure sample of S. Epidermidis, it just evolved under our nose to digest manitol and fucked everyone’s lab result.
I have jokingly said that for years about the marketing on soaps and nobody believed me. :)
Micro-evolution is absolutely crazy though. I started learning about that with fungi; mycelium specifically. Those little things can shift their genetics lightning fast. If they are exposed to different nutrient sources or growing conditions, life… uh… finds a way. There is a debate that is going on right now about the whole naming convention of fungi being broken since fruit characteristics aren’t telling a complete enough picture. While most strains of, say, pink oyster mushrooms can produce the exact same fruit they might have wildly different genetic markers while still behaving like they are from the same strain.
I think this was discovered when mycologists tried to import some mycelium into New Zealand. Different batches of mycelium were comming from the same exact strain and lineage but when it was tested for import, the genetics were too far off to match to a “legally importable” strain.
Genetic “drift” is well known. After duplicating the same strain over a number of years from petri dish to petri dish, the mycelium just adapts to a cheap and easy agar food source and its fruiting tendencies may suffer as a result. What is new, is how fast it can actually happen in the wild without it going through the genetic lottery of spore combination.
(Disclaimer: I am horrendously tired right now and I tend to jumble factoids in this state. Slap me if I got something horribly wrong.)
We saw it in real time, accidentally, in a microbiology class I took.
Lab final was basically “swab this mystery petri dish, run some tests, and tell me what it is”. So, start running different stains and indicator tests, result was eventually pretty clearly S. Aurius. Except it wasn’t. The thing that gave it away was a manitol digestion test, which S. Aurius pops positive for, but the other strain of S. ___ we tested for pop negative.
Everyone’s manitol test was positive, but the correct answer should have been S. Epidermidis.
Prof thought the test sample was contaminated, so he did an isolation swab on his own time… still a pure sample of S. Epidermidis, it just evolved under our nose to digest manitol and fucked everyone’s lab result.
He had to change everyone’s grade. :D