Description
Bacteriology
Be able to describe the morphology of individual bacteria cells.
Explanation & Answer
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There are three basic morphologies of bacteria (based on the shape of a single cell): bacillus (little rod), coccus (grain or berry) or spirillum (coiled or helical).
The morphology of a colony describes how microorganisms appear on agar media such as Sabouraud, malt agar etc. Morphology just describes the colonies. If you streak some microorganisms on agar plates, they grown (if the media is appropriate for this particular organism) and form visible colonies. The colonies appear as spots like shown in Fig 1. It is important to remember that a colony are thousands to millions of microorganisms together, not a single microorganism cell. Ideally all the cells within a colony originated from one single cell at the beginning (clonal expansion). If single cells are closer together on the agar, the individual colonies overlap and no single colonies are visible. In this case, the concentration of the yeasts is just too high to observe individual colonies.