Have you ever wondered of how bacteria actually grow or do they ever grow? A bacterium is a living thing even though it might not show its existence before our eyes. But yes certainly, bacteria have the ability to grow and also to replicate or procreate as in humans. The things we would talk here are how quickly any bacteria could grow? And how efficient E. coli could replicate when has to face thermodynamic limits? We all know that every living thing has to obey the laws of physics including thermodynamic law which is the second law of our laws of physics.
But the basic of what we have known is that things like organisms and also cells that are highly ordered actually kind of contradict this kind of law. However, we also need to remember that this kind of creature could still conform as it generates heat to its surrounding so that the heat could increase the overall entropy of the universe.
The E. Coli ExperimentA physicist named Jeremy England actually did some kind of experiment with E. coli and tested the possibility of fast replicating. However, instead of using real E. coli, Jeremy England used the replication. He mathematically modeled his own E. coli bacteria replication as similar (read: efficient) as possible (the characteristics, the size, etc) because he did not want to be failed on this experiment. For the record, E. coli itself could produces heat at least 6 times more before having to face some constraints of this universe thermodynamics second law. And according to England, when he compared the minimum and maximum amount of heat that could be generated by E. coli, he said that it was kind of exhausting as the difference was too far apart. But he was pretty sure that those bacteria were actually closer to the maximum efficiency.
When England did his experiment, he used statistical mechanics instead because quantitative is much easier to conclude. With this type of research, he intended to calculate some probabilities of molecules or atoms’ arrangements that were really varied. England also decided to focus more on the biological process that is cell division (when cell becomes two). He noticed that during the process of replication, especially in minute 20, the bacterium he used would take a good amount of food. And in this process, something happened as the bacterium actually starting to rearrange some of its molecules such as proteins and also DNA. And after this happened, the cell began to split into two parts.
The ConclusionHowever, after the split process, England was kind of stuck because he has found out that he actually needed at least 600 years of waiting to see when the heat is able to break peptide bonds which are a type of bonds that is formed in the bacteria especially during the replication. This of course really frustrated Jeremy England but he found a solution which was to estimate the waiting time. And finally he concluded that this bacterium actually produced heat one-sixth of the amount of E. coli could generate during this replication process.
The bottom line is that bacteria are able to grow really fast than they do know. But the most amazing thing is that they could still obey thermodynamic which is the second law of our laws of physics. But you might also be wondering why England used DNA instead of RNA. It was stated that DNA is neutral whereas RNA could make the cell grows faster because it is possible that RNA evolved first before there was life on Earth and even before DNA exists.
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