History of microbiology :Food preservationReligion and mythologyMicroscopesMedicineFunction in the biospherePay attention to the history but also tothe ideas……Prehistory?EARLY HISTORY (food preservation):Babylonians / yeast (a fungus) beer over 8000 years ago.Instructions for making beer in 6000year-old hieroglyphics in Egypt.Wine making dates to about5000 years ago in Persia (Iran)Also very ancient evidence in Egypt(see overheads)Beer and wine were ways to preserve food...ethanol in the wine acts as a preservativeReligion and Mythology: Roman God of Mildew - holiday April 25th - sacrifice a red dogMedicine:ancient peoples realized that diseasescould be transmitted via contaminatedclothing and that humans could developimmunity to some diseases.Varro (Roman) proposed that diseaseswere caused by tiny animals.Dark Ages = big zero for science1600'smicroscopesRobert Hooke (1635-1700)30x magnificationcork cells (L. cellulae, meaning small rooms) (see overhead)first to observe microscopic fungi.Anton von Leeuwenhoek(1632-1723) Dutch draperStarted grinding lenses as a past-timeFashioned a simplemicroscope bygrinding grains ofsand.Items could bemagnified 300 timesor more.Used magnifying glasses to inspect cloth.Looked at water in his microscope and saw:Tiny “animacules”Where did the “animacules” come from???Took clean dish, caught some rain - nocritters!Not until the fourth day did he observe thingsswimming in the water.Looked in other placesThe plaque between histeeth!Saw lots and lots of crittersFound a guy who had never cleaned his teethin his whole life - he had tons!Louis Pasteur(1822-1895) French - chemistAsked to help out at a winery - some vats were“sick” - not making any alcohol.Pasteur took samples from the sick vats andfrom some healthy vats.In the healthy ones, hesaw globules -->and realized they wereyeast.In the liquid from the “sick” wine, he did not seeany yeast, just small rod-shaped thingsswimming about.He also noticed the smell of sour milk fromthese vats.Pasteur reasoned that the yeasts mustferment the juice into alcohol, but that thebacteria fermented the juice into lacticacid instead.He put on a “show”. He said to thewinemakers,“Bring me a half dozen bottles of wine thathas gone bad with different sicknesses. Donot tell me what is wrong with them, and I’lltell you what ails them without tasting them.”The winemakers tried to fool him and slippedin a bottle of perfectly good wine…But, Pasteur got them all right.Now the issue was how to keep thesemicrobes out of the wine.They found that it simply took heating the winegently - below the point of boiling - to keep themicrobes out.This process is of course now known asPasteurization.Where were these microbes coming from?At this point in time, people still believed inthe theory ofSPONTANEOUS GENERATION.For example, at the time, this was a “recipe”for mice:“Place a dirty shirt or some rags in an open pot or barrelcontaining a few grains of wheat or some wheat bran, and in 21days, mice will appear. There will be adult males and femalespresent, and they will be capable of mating and reproducingmore mice.”Microbes were thought to be the resultof disease and not the cause..........Theologians also had big problems withspontaneous generationFrancesco Redi (Italian, 1626-1697)meat experiment....good example of anexperiment.......Even with evidence like that,many still thought microbes were sosimple that they didn't have to arisefrom other microbes.How to prove that simple microbes don’tarise via spontaneous generation?hermetically sealed vessels didn’tallow in the"vital force" = oxygenPasteur’s friend, Professor Balard, camein and gave him the idea for this:Also filtered air through sterile cotton = caught lots of microbesThus, Pasteur put an end to the idea thatthere was some "vital force" in air, and hewas the first to show that some bacteriadon't even need oxygen.anaerobes (literally (G), without air)aerobes can use O2 in their metabolism.More Pasteur accomplishments:• saved the vinegar industry• saved the silkworm industry• the first vaccine for rabies• tried to improve the quality of French beer(but he really didn’t like beer……..)Back to Pasteurization for a minute…Some things were hard to sterilize especiallyif they had touched soilTyndall (1820-1893)Cohn (1828-1898)-endospore containing cells.....Bacillus (aerobes)Clostridium (anaerobes).autoclave and pressure cooker (ca. 1880)Robert Koch(1843-1910)Koch was a German physician in the late1800’s.In his spare time, he began to study anthraxa disease of cattle and sheep and sometimespeople.He noticed long threads in the blood of cattlethat had died from the disease - they were thebacilli that other people had announced werethe cause of the disease - but no one had provenit.Koch then went and got tons of blood fromhealthy cattle and sheep.None of them had the bacilli in their blood.He began to experiment with mice, injectingblood from sick cows into them.Sure enough…the mice got sick and when helooked at their blood under the microscope,he found the bacilli.Still, he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to beable to prove that the rods, the bacteria, grewinside the mouse.He thought and thought…He finally put some bloodfrom a sick mouse into theaqueous humor from an ox’seye onto a slide.Lo and behold - the bacilli began to multiply!!Koch continued to keep this “culture” ofbacilli growing, every day repeating hisexperiment by adding a tiny bit of theinfected drop into a new clean one.After eight days, he took a drop of thisculture - one that had not been inside amouse, and injected it into a fresh, healthymouse.The next day…. The mouse was dead!He looked at the mouse’s spleen under themicroscope and guess what he saw!the same bacilli.Koch and his postulates:1) The disease organism must be presentin sick animals and not present in healthyones.2) The organism must be cultivated in pureculture away from the patient’s body.3) This culture, when inoculated into ahealthy animal should produce thecharacteristic symptoms of the disease.4) The organism can be re-isolated fromthese animals.Fannie Hesse discovered that agar could be used asa solidifying agent for bacteriological media in 1882.This greatly accelerated the development ofMicrobiology.Paul Ehrlich and chemotherapy. Noticed bacteriapicked up certain stains more readily than didmammalian tissue. Success was with Salvarsan thatkilled