Bacterial Species

Section I- Introduction and definition of a Bacterial Species

The field of biology has been a challenge for over four hundred years. An essential part of this problem would be the field of Microbiology. In Microbiology, there is application in which we group organism into different species. This application is called taxonomy. Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification of different organism in the same domain. With taxonomy, we see a short glance on how species are categorized but what about the other organisms that breed in other domains of life that cannot be categorized. This concept is called the biological species concept. From this concept a species can be described as a concept that defines a species as members of populations that potentially can interbreed in nature, even though the similarity of appearance can be a factor (Caldwell, 2006). This is perceived as a species that interbreed and create applicable offspring. According to the definition of biological species concept, there are limitations within the biological genome on which an organism can interbreed from other domains of species. Unfortunately, this is looked frowned upon towards biologist because they’re no such thing as breeding within prokaryotes. Microbiologist have discussed over the years on how they could define theses organism.

This where techniques called DNA-DNA hybridization and horizontal gene transfer come into play. These techniques helped shaped by 16s rRNA sequence data, DNA hybridization assays, and horizontal gene transfer. DNA hybridization is a technique where two DNA sequence strands are melted, mixed and re-annealed. The end result should show a percentage of complementary bases, which be, evaluates if it’s a new species (...

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...ch is distinctive to Staphylococcus aureus. When tested for coagulase, unknown #52 became positive which ruled out Staphylococcus epidermidis. Lastly, when testing the 16s rRNA, the assumption proved that unknown #52 was Staphylococcus aureus. When conducting these various test, we accumulated the results to be accurate and consistent with the identification of the bacterial genus. When viewing the flow chart in the next page, there no significant error in which my unknown would have not been questioned if it was wrong. The only test that I did extra to further solidify my unknown was the Bacitracin test which gave us a positive result that identified that our result is Staphylococcus aureus. The precise precaution was taken and multiple tests were done to verify the accuracy of unknown #52, which undoubtedly gave us the correct unknown name Staphylococcus aureus.