The plaque (microbial biofilm) that forms between your teeth…

The plaque (microbial biofilm) that forms between your teeth is a highly anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment, even though the mouth is one of the most aerobic habitats in the body and most of the bacteria living there can use oxygen if it is available. Why is there no oxygen in the plaque between your teeth?

You have a pure culture of a given bacterium, and you want t…

You have a pure culture of a given bacterium, and you want to determine its CFU, so you perform the following steps: Take 1 mL from the pure culture and add it to 9 mL of sterile saline in test tube 1; mix. Take 0.1 mL from test tube 1 and add it to 9.9 mL of sterile saline in test tube 2; mix. Take 0.1 mL from test tube 2 and add it to 9.9 mL of sterile saline in test tube 3; mix. Take 0.1 mL from test tube 3 and add it to the surface of a solid medium in a plate using the spread-plate method. Repeat step 4 using a second plate to obtain a duplicate. Incubate for 24 hours. After incubation, you count 178 colonies on one plate and 165 colonies on the other. What is the calculated CFU of the original pure culture?

Consider the following image showing the electron transport…

Consider the following image showing the electron transport chain complexes that can be found in Escherichia coli.    Knowing that ATPase needs approximately 3.3 H+ to make 1 ATP molecule, how many more ATP molecules per NADH will be produced by E. coli when oxygen is used as the final electron acceptor compared to nitrate.