BIOL 3052 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Food Microbiology, Spore, Food Processor
29 Jan 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Bacteria are the most important microorganisms to the food processor. Most are harmless, many are highly beneficial, some indicate the probable presence of filth, disease organisms, spoilage and a few cause disease. There are thousands of species of bacteria, but all are single-celled and fall into three basic shapes: spherical, straight rods, and spiral rods. To see them, you need a microscope that magnifies about 1000-fold. All bacteria reproduce by dividing into two cells. The two cells then divide to become 4, 4 become 8, and so forth. Under ideal conditions, this doubling may occur as frequently as every 15 minutes, so that within 5 hours there will be more than a million cells from the original single cell. If there are 1000 original cells instead of a single one, there will be over 1 billion cells in 5 hours. Some rod-shaped bacteria are capable of existing in two forms, dormant spores and active vegetative cells.
