Exam 1 Flashcards
(41 cards)
What is the primary directive of microbial life?
survive, generate (ATP), grow, and replicate
Where are bacteria commonly found?
In practically every environment
What environments are Archaea found in?
Many environments but are mostly concentrated in extreme environments= extremophiles
Where are Fungi commonly found?
mostly in terrestrial and aquatic environments
What is evolutionarily linked to plants in an array of symbiotic relationship from pathogen to mutualists?
Fungi
What are protists?
Unicellular or colonial eukaryotes
How to protists obtain energy?
They are both autotrophic and heterotrophic
What are Oomycetes?
water molds (extremely good pathogens)
What are the main unique traits of microbes?
small size, ubiquitous distribution through Earth’s habitats, high surface area to volume ratio, potentially high rate of metabolic activity, potentially rapid growth rate, unrivaled nutritional diversity, unrivaled enzymatic diversity
Why are microbes important?
geochemical cycling of elements, detoxification of organic and inorganic pollutants, release of essential limiting nutrients from the biomass (recycling agents), maintaining the chemical composition of soil, sediment, water, and atmosphere required by other forms of life. environmental quality, agriculture, and climate change, diversity is key yo human survival
What is Earth’s Biosphere?
global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere
What is panspermia
life or materials for life originated from other planets
What is abiogenesis?
life originated on Earth through natural processes
How much of life’s history is prokaryotes?
70%
the reduction homologation of hydrogen cyanide was shown to produce what?
ribonucleotides, amino acids and lipids
what are the steps in the formation of our biosphere
abiotic synthesis of proteins and RNA, RNA world-self replicating and catalytic RNA, DNA is superior to RNA as a stable reservoir of genetic information while proteins have superior catalyst
What are the competing theories of mitochondria evolution?
Cellular complexity arose in a stepwise fashion prior to the endosymbiotic uptake (of the a-proteobacterium) or eukaryotic cellular complexity arose after endosymbiosis
Explain Chloroplast evolution
primary endosymbiosis (uptake of a cyanobacterium by a non-photosynthetic eukaryote) then secondary endosymbiosis when a primary plastid-bearing algal is ingested by a non-photosynthetic eukaryote. Secondary plastids are characterized by the presence of three or four membranes
What is phenetics
approach to classifying organisms based on the overall similarity
what is cladistics
approach to classifying organisms based on the phylogeny
what do you use to analyze microbial communities
amplicon sequence variants (ASV)
What are sequences of microbes clustered into?
OTUs based on 97% similarity
what is species richness?
how many? number of different species in the sample/locations
What is evenness
describes distribution of species in the sample/location (0-1(even))
