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Hello. I'm Daniel Neill. I'm a senior lecturer in microbiology at the University of Dundee. Today we're going to be talking about bacterial diseases.
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I've divided today's talk into five sections. First we'll cover bacterial diversity. Then we'll move on to discuss the burden of bacterial disease, a little bit of detail on disease mechanisms, and then we'll finish up with some examples of bacterial disease and some perspectives for the future.
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First part, we'll cover bacterial diversity.
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Bacteria come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What they have in common is that they're all prokaryotic microorganisms and they're ubiquitous across environments. Virtually every ecosystem on Earth relies on bacteria in some way, shape or form. Human history has been shaped by bacteria. Although this lecture will focus on the role of bacteria as disease causing organisms, I wanted to start by making the point that they've actually been fundamental to the evolution of life on Earth and to human life in particular. Many of the processes that we rely on including fermentation, rely on microorganisms. Indeed much of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced by cyanobacteria conducting photosynthesis in our oceans. On a fundamental level for humans, bacteria are essential for health and the human digestive tract alone contains more than a 100 trillion bacterial cells. In the figure on the left here we can see three different characterisations of bacteria that are based upon morphology. At the top we can see the rod shaped bacteria which are termed the cilli, in the middle spirochetes which are these spiral forms of bacteria, and at the bottom the cocci.

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