What makes germs multiply

Simply washing your hands can help prevent such illnesses as the common cold or eye infections. The germs are then passed to those who eat the food. This is easily prevented by always washing your hands after using the toilet and before preparing food items.

Running chopping boards through a dishwasher at high temperatures helps disinfect them. Old chopping boards of any material should be replaced. Knife grooves and worn areas on plastic chopping boards can become a breeding ground for microorganisms.

Pores in old wooden chopping boards can become clogged and lose their food safety benefits. In coronavirus studies, the most resilient viruses took up residence on non-porous plastic and steel. Infectious particles have been detected on both surfaces for up to 72 hours. Inhospitable conditions like sunlight and high humidity also harm the virus.

When it comes to surface transmission, non-porous surfaces that we touch often but rarely clean remain a concern. You are likely to be aware of door handles, elevator buttons and other surfaces in high-traffic areas touched by multiple strangers. Many of us keep them with us when we eat, some sleep with them and admit it we may even carry them to the toilet with us. A lot of what we touch likely ends up on our phones. As with other surfaces, the greatest risk is in healthcare settings. When was the last time you cleaned your phone?

A 70 per cent isopropyl alcohol solution or other cleaning method suggested by the manufacturer of your device, done regularly, would improve things a lot. Normally, cells lacking the enzyme that creates pyruvate form Z rings toward the ends of the cells, but when pyruvate was added again, the bacteria started forming the Z rings in the middle of the cell, like healthy bacterial cells do.

Have a look at the different positions of Z rings in cells lacking the enzyme involved in the last step of glycolysis and when pyruvate is added back to these cells, in Figures 2C,D. This result confirmed that it is not the enzyme itself that is important for the position of the Z ring, but its product—pyruvate. This was the first time that a link between a chemical involved in glycolysis and cell division had been shown, and so pyruvate then became the focus of our further experiments.

With the finding that pyruvate is important for Z ring formation in the middle of the cell, we became even more curious to understand how the processes of metabolism and cell division communicate. We know that when pyruvate is produced, it then gets used by another enzyme to produce energy in the cell.

We wondered if this second enzyme was located in a certain place inside a bacterial cell, which helps the Z ring form in the middle. In healthy bacteria, we found that the enzyme and DNA were located in the same place, where they both could be seen as round blobs inside the cell Figure 3. In cells that could not produce pyruvate, we found that the enzyme was no longer present at the same place as the DNA, instead the enzyme moved toward the two ends of the cell. This is the same place where Z rings form in the cells that do not divide properly.

We already know that adding pyruvate to these cells shifts the Z ring back to the middle of the cell again, so we wondered if pyruvate would also change the location of enzyme back to where the DNA was found. This is exactly what happened! These results showed that pyruvate is important for the correct positioning of the Z ring in the middle of the cell, and pyruvate does this somehow by working with the enzyme that uses pyruvate to make energy.

This makes sense, because pyruvate and the enzyme work together in the same pathway. Our results showed that metabolism and bacterial cell division communicate with each other through pyruvate and the enzyme that uses pyruvate to produce energy to ensure the Z ring forms in the right place. In well-fed bacteria that can properly make pyruvate , the enzyme is located in the same place as DNA in the cell.

At this location, the enzyme seems to help the Z ring form in the middle of the cell, so the cell divides correctly. However, if cells do not make pyruvate, the enzyme ends up in the wrong place and so does the Z ring toward to ends of the cell. So, when food is not processed correctly and pyruvate is not produced, bacteria start to make mistakes in the cell division process. This is similar to what is seen in people with lactose intolerance. When they drink milk, they cannot process lactose properly and therefore become sick.

So, the ability to correctly process food and be healthy is really important for all living things. When food is not processed the way it should be in bacteria, the Z ring is formed at locations where it should not be, which makes cells divide the wrong way, reducing the number of bacteria chance of the bacterial population surviving.

This mistake in division can be fixed by giving bacteria the correct food adding back pyruvate , showing that the way bacteria use the food in their environment is critical for their ability to grow and divide. The question we asked in this study was: how do bacteria sense food availability in the environment and how does the presence of food affect the process of cell division? When food is easy to find, bacteria grow and divide very quickly, but they divide much more slowly when food is scarce.

They are nasty little creatures that can make us all very sick. Germs lie in wait on surfaces, having been left there by something or someone that is infected. Our hands come in contact with the surface and we then touch our eye, mouth or nose, allowing the germs to enter our bodies, making us ill. So what are we to do? Washing our hands with regular soap under warm running water is one of the best ways to prevent illness and the spread of germs to others.

The U. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the following steps:. Hand washing is one of the best ways to keep yourself from getting being sick.