mona lisa production

Bacteria are our most distant known ancestors, from more than 3.5 billion years back, can you imagine!
In Australia, geologists are searching to locate fossils of these distant relatives, the cyanobacteria, on rock fragments.

1.5 billion years ago, bacteria proliferated and joined together to form the first multicellular being, baptized Lucas by scientists. A being with a greatly limited genetic inheritance, that neither breathed nor photosynthesized.
So how did Lucas live in such an extreme environment inhabited by menacing viruses?
To answer this question, researchers are trying to track down Lucas in South Africa and Greenland, slicing up rocks with circular saws. A group of Japanese and American scientists are even attempting to recreate him with computers.

Other teams working in Antarctica have discovered colonies of bacteria that prosper in temperatures of minus 68°C, in conditions that resemble those found on Mars. And so bacteria have been placed on a meteorite attached to a satellite and sent off into space in an attempt to understand how life began.
Bacteria are in fact capable of surviving in an icy hell or an inferno. They possess certain properties that enable them to resist freezing at 0°C, a sort of antifreeze obtained by the production of molecules of sugar or alcohol.
Others resist the alkalinity of certain lakes, the boiling waters of the geysers of New Zealand, and doses of gamma radiation 3000 times above those that would kill a human. Enough to destroy their DNA, but bacteria possess a veritable repair kit, with which they can reconstitute broken fragments of DNA.

Might not these extraordinary powers be exploited by man?
The first to use them were surely cheese and wine makers, for the fermentation of their products.
Today, bacteria have been industrialized in the pharmaceutical sector, in insecticides, plastics, solvents, washing powders...
They are in use everywhere, even at the Louvre for restoring paintings, or in Sony electro-acoustic speakers.

Thanks to bacteria, scientists have even invented a new lifestyle! In effect, in the future certain bacteria will feed on our dirt and allow us to have self-cleaning clothes. Others will treat our waste, filter our exhaust pipes, clean up oil slicks and make skiing out of season possible. Others will treat cancer: we have been promised bacteria therapy.

But in the meantime, bacteria still belong to the world of microbes and their misdeeds...
E. coli is responsible for food poisoning, Helicobacter pylori for ulcers... We still have to live with them.