what is microbiology – I'm a Scientist 2024

Question: what is microbiology
- Keywords:
  microbiology
Asked by anon-377676 to Alexander dB, Erin P, hayleypincott, Martin M, Michael S on 21 Feb 2024.
- Erin Pallott answered on 21 Feb 2024:
  
  Microbiology is generally the study of organisms/living things that are too small to be seen with the naked eye. This is mainly living things that are made of one cell. It can include other branches of biology like bacteriology (bacteria), virology (viruses, although they’re not technically alive), parasitology (for protozoan parasites like malaria), and mycology (fungi).
  
  However, a cool exception to the rule was a bacteria discovered recently that is 5,000 times longer than a normal bacteria and looks a bit like an eyelash. This article describes that as the equivalent of meeting someone as tall as Mount Everest!!
  https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/june/worlds-largest-bacteria-are-visible-naked-eye.html
- Martin McCoustra answered on 22 Feb 2024:
  
  Erin has given a nice answer….
- Hayley Pincott answered on 23 Feb 2024:
  
  Scientific words are quite easy to break down, so even if you don’t know then you can make a very good educated guess.
  
  Anything starting with micro means small & tiny, bio means to live and anything ending in ology means to study. So simply put microbiology is to study small living things. Microbiology is the study of microorganisms (or microbes…..it’s a bit easier to use) such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, & protozoa
  
  Microbes are everywhere: soil, water, air, and even in/on us humans. In fact we are made up of more microbes than human cells. I watched a TikTok (@dr.karanr) where he asked if we should actually think of ourselves as skin suits for microorganisms. A bit gross but he’s not technically wrong.
  
  However don’t panic we need all these microbes to keep us fit and healthy and without them we would struggle to survive. Only 1% of microbes make us ill the rest either don’t bother us if kept at healthy levels (eg: by washing your hands & brushing your teeth) or are hugely beneficial to us by helping to produce food, drink and medicines.
- Alexander De Bruin answered on 26 Feb 2024:
  
  I’ll leave this to the biologists – essentially the study of small living things that require at least a microscope to see
- Michael Schubert answered on 26 Feb 2024:
  
  Some great answers here already! A lot of people think that microbiology is mostly a medical field, but microbes of all kinds have so many talents that they’re relevant to almost everyone. For instance, yeast is a microbe and it can help us do everything from bake bread to study genetics. We know about bacteria that can eat plastic and viruses that can edit genomes. It’s a very cool field!