One of the traditional arguments against abiogenesis was the claim that the heat used to sterilize the air or specimens was destroying a vital force of life which did not allow microorganisms to spontaneously appear. People believed for many centuries the concept of spontaneous generation, i.e. the creation of life from organic matter. The proponents […]
JOHN TYNDALL (1820-1883) Read More »
General Microbiology
Alexander Flemming, a Scottish born physician who spent most of his time studying bacteria discovered the world’s first antibiotic “Penicillin” from the mould Penicillium notatum. Though, mankind has used a number of chemicals including herbs to treat infectious diseases since time immemorial, the astonishing discovery of penicillin (the first therapeutically used antibiotic) marked the beginning
ALEXANDER FLEMMING (1881-1955) Read More »
General Microbiology
Avery Oswald was a Canadian-born American physician and medical researcher who provided the molecular explanation for Griffith’s transformation of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for his discovery in 1944 that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are
AVERY OSWALD (1877-1955) Read More »
General Microbiology
Hans Gram developed a microbiological technique which is still used today in clinical microbiology practice and bacteriology in particular for microbial identification and classification. His technique is generally used in microbiology for differentiating and classifying bacteria into two major types based on their reaction to certain stains or dye. The technique he developed is called
HANS CHRISTIAN JOACHIM GRAM (1853-1938) Read More »
General Microbiology
Robert Hooke was the first scientist to study and record living cells using the microscope. The existence of organisms too small to be seen by the naked eyes had long been suspected even before the discovery of the microscope but there was no particular instrument for their study as at the time until the microscope
ROBERT HOOKE (1635-1703) Read More »
General Microbiology
John Needham is the English scientist who performed experiments on spontaneous generation or abiogenesis in mutton broth and hay infusions. Needham showed that mutton broth boiled in flask and then sealed could still develop microorganisms, which supported the theory of spontaneous generation. He took hot boiling mutton gravy (meat infusion) in a flask and closed
JOHN NEEDHAM (1713-1781) Read More »
General Microbiology
Anthony Van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch scientist and tradesman who did a part time job as a draper and amateur microscopist while investigating the microbial world whit his crude or simple microscopes. Leeuwenhoek is generally known as “the Father of Microbiology”, and he is also considered to be the first microbiologist since he was the
ANTHONY VAN LEEUWENHOEK (1632-1723) Read More »
General Microbiology
Robert Koch, a German scientist was the first medical microbiologist. Koch was also the first to establish the actual relationship between the causative agent of a disease and the disease condition itself. Koch ushered in the beginning of bacteriology, an important field in microbiology that studies bacteria; and he is thus regarded as the father
ROBERT KOCH (1843-1910) Read More »
General Microbiology
Microbiology as a field in the biological sciences saw the light of the day because of several innovative research and experiments by pioneers in this field. The study of microbiology will be incomplete without a touch on the founding fathers of this important field of biological sciences. Several scientists in time past contributed tremendously to
Historical Perspectives of Microbiology Read More »
General Microbiology
Microorganisms are ubiquitous and they play several roles in the degradation of recalcitrant organic and inorganic materials in the environment. The degradation of these materials that constitute environmental hazards in the environment can be carried out under aerobic and anaerobic conditions; and these processes leads to the production of several environmentally-friendly substances and compounds that
SIGNIFICANCE OF BIODETERIORATION/BIODEGRADATION Read More »
Environmental & Soil Microbiology