Frederick Griffith was a microbiologist in 1928. He experimented with pathogenic bacteria. He experimented with mice and infected them with Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria and began to notice that the mice were dying of blood poisoning. Next he infected similar mice with a different a mutant form of the bacteria, S. pneumoniae. This bacteria did not have the harmful strain’s polysaccharide capsule. These mice showed no symptoms of illness.
This showed Griffith that the polysaccharide capsule was needed for infection. The form of poison that Griffith used on the first set of mice is the S. form because it is normal and non mutant. The poison used on the second set of mice was the R. form which is a mutant form of S. Later in his experiment the mice infected with the R. bacteria started to form disease symptoms and some of them died. The R. bacteria became live while it was in the mice which turned it into the S. form bacteria. I found this topic interesting because of the way changing one very small part of a bacteria cell can either make it deadly or not dangerous at all.
Questions:
Why did Griffith test mice in his experiment?
How dangerous is the Streptococcus pneumoniae?
How does the S. bacteria cause blood poisoning?
No comments:
Post a Comment