Secondary metabolites are organic compounds that are produced by the modifying primary metabolite synthases. Unlike primary metabolites, secondary metabolites are not really important in growth, development, and reproduction. They are formed during the end or near the stationary phase of growth. Secondary metabolites play an important role in ecological function, like the defence mechanism by serving as antibiotics and by producing pigments. However, some secondary metabolites can be important to scientists in the lab and some examples of these types of secondary metabolites are atropine and antibiotics such as erythromycin and bacitracin.
It is important for a scientist to know what type of metabolite a product is because some type of metabolite like the primary metabolite are really crucial for growth and development and reproduction, this therefore makes primary metabolites important for growing cultures of bacteria.
Distinction 3
The lag phase
The lag phase is the period of time between the birth of a microorganism into a culture medium and the time it begins to increase exponentially
The log / exponential growth phase
The log Phase of a bacteria growth is where all the cells are dividing regularly, and are growing rapidly at a constant, exponential rate.
Stationary phase
The stationary phase in the cycle refers to the phase in which the number of cells produced does not increase anymore and stays the same. During the stationary phase, the rate of bacterial cell growth is equal to the rate of bacterial cell death.
Decline phase
Finally, the last phase of the cycle is the death of bacteria, this happens because of various factors such as the lack of some nutrients, a temperature which is too high or low, or the wrong living conditions.
The generation time
The generation time is how long it takes bacteria to grow and divide rapidly multiply, the generation time I obtained from my graph was 1 hour which was between 10 and 11 hours. This indicates that it takes a full hour for a cell to multiply every time.
It is important to know the generation time of a microorganism because it helps to know when exactly a bacterium can grow and spread easily and how fast the bacterium will do it. For example, if a scientist wants carry out an experiment on bacteria, he needs to know how many starter bacteria to use, and how long to grow it will take for them to grow, in order to get enough bacteria for an experiment and carry out the experiment efficiently.
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