1. A doctor is treating Patient A for an apparent bacterial lung infection, caus
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1. A doctor is treating Patient A for an apparent bacterial lung infection, caused by rod-shaped cells. She prescribes antibiotics that disrupt bacterial translational and transcriptional machinery. To her surprise, this treatment does not work, and Patient A does not improve. Provide two reasons why this treatment may have been ineffective. 1) Patient A has been coughing a lot, and now Patient B, who was making a quick recovery from an infection after getting antibiotics, begins to get sick again. Patient B does not have any rod-shaped cells in his infected tissues, so how could you explain why the antibiotics prescribed to Patient B seemed to have stopped working? Why is it in advisable to give antibiotics to healthy people? 2. Imagine you are a farmer in Ohio growing corn. You know that plants need sun, air, water, and nutrients like nitrogen and sulfur. What kind of prokaryotes should corn farmers want to be abundant in the soil to help grow corn? What kind of prokaryotes should corn farmers NOT want to be abundant in the soil? Briefly explain your answers. hio farmers grow a combination of soybeans andc one year to the next. Why might they be doing this? (hint: search Wikipedia for "legume" and read the few sentences). What would happen to the soil if farmers only grew corn, year after year?Explanation / Answer
1. The patient is having infection caused by rod shaped bacteria. The antibiotic works by disrupting transcriptional and translational machinery. The antibiotic might be stopped working in the patient may be due to gaining of resistance by bacterium or a coinfection with other bacterium of different shape which is not affected by this antibiotic. The antibiotic may not work on transcription and translation machinery of other bacterium becuase of its specificity only against the rod shaped bacterium or narrow range.
The patient B is recovering but becomes sick again due to other infection caused by a different pathogen which is a coccus. The antibiotics prescribes earlier stopped working because they are specific to rod shaped bacteria (narrow range) or the bacteria might gained resistance and the present infection requires a different and potent antibiotic (Broad range) to treat the infection. Frequent antibiotic treatment in healthy individuals cause the bacteria to gain resistance against the antibiotics and antibiotics no more effective against infections.
2. Farmers growing corn crop want the prokaryotic population that can fix the atmospheric nitrogen to increase soil nitorgen levels as the corn requires nitrogen. The farmers do not want the denitrifies to grow in soil as they deplete the nitrogen sources in soil.
Corn and soybeans are rotated crops and are effective to maintain soil nitorgen. This is because, soybean is a legume plant and contains nitrogen fixing Rhizobium bactertia in its root nodules. The atmospheric nitorgen fixed by these bacteria is released into soil and enrich the soil with nitrogen. When the corn is grown as next crop it obtains the sufficient soil nitorgen. Therefore, crop raotation of soybean and corn is much useful and increase the yield of corn.
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