How bacteria kill each other?

Hello, this is Sarah. And I’ll tell you more about how bacteria kill other bacteria. Why would that be important? Imagine you have a handful of soil of Earth from the forest. And in there, you have millions and trillions of microorganisms, for example, bacteria. And in that soil, there’s a lot of food for the bacteria as well and to survive and grow they all want to eat. So they’re only to get the food. So what do they do? They kill all the other bacteria. And for that, they use a special bacterial nano weapon. And researchers could actually see this nano weapon under the microscope. So here you can see a red bacterium and a green bacterium. And the green bacterium always has these little dots. And they shoot these dots into the red bacterium, and then the red bacterium just runs up and doesn’t look happy, and eventually it just dies. So what does this deadly arrow this bacteria nano weapon look like? Imagine a bow and arrow. And the bow can be as long as the whole bacterium itself. And on top of the bow is the arrow, the arrow has a sharp tip. With this, it can punch holes into the, into the prey bacteria. And the interesting thing about this bow and arrow is that the bacterium glues so called toxins to the arrow. So when the bacterium launches the arrow, and it shoots it into the other bacteria, the toxin that is glued to the error is also being delivered into this free material. And this toxin is actually the bad one, because the toxin eats the bacteria. This is what kills it in the end. So why would bacteria do such an awful thing? That I said at the beginning, it’s about food. So when bacteria kill other bacteria, they will have all the food for themselves. Like this, they can just grow and divide and be happy and be the kings in the nation the environment. Another possibility for bacteria is that they use what is left of the dead bacterium. So another bacteria are made of DNA of the genome. And this is what gives bacteria superpowers. So when the attacker killed the bacterium, it just takes up all the genome and integrates it into its own. It takes out just those genes that it wants, and that gives them new superpowers. And with this, the bacteria just become more powerful. So how could we use this bacteria nano weapon for own good? Researchers, first of all, trying to understand how this nano weapon works to make use of it. And then they want to get one bacterium that we already know is harmless to us, and they give it this nanoweapon and then they sent this bacterium off to a site of infection, where there are bad bacteria. So our bacterium with a nano weapon is supposed to kill all the bad guys. And with this, we wouldn’t need antibiotics anymore. So thank you for listening, I hope you learnt that bacteria can kill other bacteria to get rid of them. They use sharp arrows and bows to do this, and everybody here just wants to survive and grow. And hopefully this bacterial nano weapon at some point will be our alternative to antibiotics. Thank you for watching with STEMcognito. Fly more videos using the search box or the drop down menus above. If you think there’s something wrong with this video, please use the Report button to inform the STEMcognito team. Questions about the video content should be directed to the researcher. You can find their details below. Go to our submission pages to find out how to submit your own video and don’t forget to follow us on social media.