• Question: what are the names of some bacteria that we carry around every day

    Asked by caoimhe to Chloe on 10 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by 583ntrd39, Leroy Brown.
    • Photo: Chloe Huseyin

      Chloe Huseyin answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      So our entire body is covered in all kinds of different micro-organisms, they live all over our bodies like on our skin and hair, under our nails and in our digestive system (to name just a few places).

      This is a really cool picture of a hand that was pressed down on an agar plate (it’s one of the ways we grow micro-organisms) and then incubated to see what kind of micro-organisms were on the persons skin http://www.microbeworld.org/component/jlibrary/?view=article&id=13867 as you can see from the different colours and morphologies (shapes) of the colonies that grew there are lots of different types (and that is just one hand!) so it would take a very long time to list all the different ones we carry around with us every day..

      If I had to pick a few species (just because I think the names are cool) I would say Staphylococcus (which tends to live on the skin) and Lactobacillus (which tends to live in our digestive tract).

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