• Question: What is your favourite bacteria?

    Asked by save1gree on 19 Sep 2025. This question was also asked by jasmine.
    • Photo: Karen Adler

      Karen Adler answered on 19 Sep 2025:

      My favourite bacteria is Pseudomonas aeruginosa! Most bacteria (with a few exceptions) grow as white or cream coloured colonies on a petri dishg, but P. aeruginosa is usually a lovely light green as a result of it making less-than-lovely toxins that are blue and yellow. However, some strains can be neon highlighter yellow, deep turquoise, dark grey, even dark red! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5k4OFDaYAAuBBa?format=jpg or https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GOlCoifbwAA8IGe?format=jpg
      They make a chemical that smells a bit like grape candy too, it is very strange! They have several tails (called flagella) all coming out together like a ponytail, so they are very good swimmers! Here is a video I recorded through the eyepiece of a microscope with my phone, you can see their shadows swimming around (not sped up) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BnUyRwAfi4BmMUFxgWa1Pu2kosM9rSHU/view?usp=sharing

      However, they are quite nasty… they can cause really terrible infections, especially in patients with burns or people who have cystic fibrosis. They are also very often resistant to multiple types of antibiotics – so my research involves trying to kill them!

    • Photo: Michael Capeness

      Michael Capeness answered on 3 Oct 2025:

      My favourite bacteria is called Bdellovibrio (Dell-o-vib-rio). Not only is it super fast, it also eats other bacteria but pulling themselves inside them, releasing lots of enzymes to make the bacteria’s inside into a soup. It then eats this soup to make more Bdellovibrio, and escapes.

    • Photo: Pete Webb

      Pete Webb answered on 14 Nov 2025:

      I don’t have one.

    • Photo: John Clark-Corrigall

      John Clark-Corrigall answered on 14 Nov 2025:

      I worked on a probiotic bacteria, which is a bacteria that provides a benefit to the host, that can be accessing nutrients or production of metabolites which prevent infection by disease causing bacteria, top line it is a helpful bacteria.

      The bacteria is called E. coli Nissle 1917, it has a really cool backstory, in that the bacteria was discovered and isolated from a German Soldier on the western front during world war 1 (that’s the 1917 bit in its name). During world war 1 there was disease in the trenches, particularly Dysentery which is a bacterial infection which causes diarrhoea and dehydration and made people very unwell. Dysentery was amplified because of poor sanitation in the trenches. WELL, one soldier didn’t get dysentery when everyone else in his company did, so a German doctor called Alfred Nissle isolated the bacteria from the healthy soldier’s poo and found it was combative with other disease causing bacteria too! In the 100 years since, there’s been lots of research into how it works and has been used as a treatment for gastrointestinal distress particularly in Germany.

      There’s not a good video, it too has flagella so moves like Karen’s Pseudomonas bacteria, but I did a cartoon of E. coli Nissle 1917 for World micro-organism day 2024 for the Microbiology Society – link below. (E. coli Nissle 1917 doesn’t have boxing gloves down a microscope, not even electron microscopy shows them).

      https://microbiologysociety.org/blog/celebrating-international-microorganism-day-2024-with-society-champions.html

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