Cell wall

The organisms used in this lab are the Ascomycota fungi Sordaria fimicola. S. fimicola is made of haploid cells in a hyphae. A diploid cell is formed when two haploid nuclei bud off of the hyphae. This diploid cell then undergoes meiosis and mitosis forming eight haploid cells called a tetrad. The cells develop within an ascospore, and a group of ascospores is an ascus. An perithecia contains the asci (Glase, 1995). S. fimicola have a unique feature in their meiotic process which easily lends…

The hypothesis could be proven. If water is filtered through a pine dowel, then this permeable wood will filter the impurities out of the water through the process of osmosis. The water will pass through leaving the impurities behind. This experiment did prove the hypothesis however, it may have worked better if more time was allowed for most of the water to go completely through the wood, if the wood were less dense, and if the dirt in the water wasn’t so fine. In my experiment I observed that…

solution, the concertation of a substance is larger within the cell; the cell gains water to dilute this concertation . in hypertonic solution, the concentration of substance is larger in solution than the cell. The cell will…

The 5 modes of action for antimicrobial drugs can affect the cell wall. It affects the peptidoglycan layer on the cell wall. It does this by breaking the peptidoglycan chains apart. An example of a drug is penicillin, methicillin and ampicillin. The second thing they can do is affect the plasma membrane. They do this by breaking up the lipids o the plasma membrane. Some drugs that do this are polymyxin, bacitracin. Most are antibacterial and anti-fungal drugs. The third thing they can do I s…

know, bacterial cells have cell walls containing peptidoglycan. When bacteria divide, holes actually appear in their cell walls that must be filled with peptidoglycan. However, penicillin inhibits proteins that are needed to link the peptidoglycan together. So when bacterial cells try to divide when penicillin is present, the holes in the cell wall cannot be filled in with peptidoglycan. The bacterial cell will eventually burst as solutes from the environment rush into the cell through these…

free water. The bound water is held within cell walls by bonding forces between water and cellulose molecules, while the free water is contained in the cell cavities and is not held by these forces. The amount of water in wood can be calculated and expressed as a percent of the dry weight is called the “Moisture Content” (MC). The hygroscopic nature of wood cause the water movement, either along the grain or across the grain. The free water moves through cell cavities (along the grain) and pit…

Normally during cell wall synthesis peptidoglycan precursors is transported across the cell membrane into the periplasm where it binds to cell wall acceptors. These precursors undergo excessive cross linking by tranpeptidase and D-alanyl carboxypeptidase to synthesise the cell wall. The presence of β-lactam rings competitively inhibits the enzymes by binding to their active site. Thus inhibiting cell wall synthesis which stops cell division and causes lysis due to fragility of cell wall and high…

Although these two cells share a lot of similarities there are also many differences between the common prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, however more specifically I will be exploring how the structure relates to the function of an animal cell and a non-photosynthetic prokaryotic cell, and it is explained that, “analysing a biological structure gives us clues about what it does and how it works” (Campbell et al: 2014, p.52). The structure and the function of a cell generally aren’t one without…

The development of advanced microscopes has enabled scientists to further their investigation on the criteria for life. As a result, biologists have been confronted with a baffling question: is there a size limit on life? If so, then just how small can something be before it can no longer be considered alive? Ever since the discovery of nano-sized particles called “nanobacteria” or “nanobes”, researchers have been scrambling to unravel and analyze the mysterious functions of these purported…

Throughout the semester in the microbiology lab we have been taught how to conduct multiple experiments to identify microorganisms. Many of these experiments can be used on all different types of microorganisms but cumulatively they can help isolate a singular microorganism’s identity. At the beginning of the semester we were divided into several groups and were assigned an unknown of which we were tasked with identifying. Being assigned number 14 as our unknown, my group consisting of…