I love it when bacterial colonies grow in bright colors. Mostly the isolated ones we had and used for daily practicums are either transparent or opaque white/cream, not quite distinct from each other. But we do have some with personalities. The one I remember the most is Serratia marcescens, this gorg bloody red thing.
S. marcescens dwells in soil, water, and just everywhere in the environment. They might contaminate food and cause food poisoning and urinary tract inflammation. We only used S. marcescens to study the pigmentation. It’s not my favorite bacteria or anything, so I wasn’t driven to look further about its characteristics and stories. I had maybe just 3 notable encounters with it. I saw it on spoiled rice, and toilet slimes. It was also present in mixed culture isolated from cockroach’s inside.
Anyway, this was on my mind a few days ago because my store bought kimbab got pink spots that remind me of and most probably are S. marcescens contamination. So I just casually browsed about S. marcescens and its history and look at what I saw..
The red pigment production is not present in all strains but in those that it is present, it can resemble blood [10]. This and the fact that Serratia marcescens typically grows on bread and communion wafers stored in moist places, has led scientists to suggest Serratia contamination as a possible explanation for transubstantiation miracles (the conversion of bread to the body and blood of Christ)
— microbewiki.kenyon.edu (my favorite online database of everything microbe ❤)
I didn’t.. expect that..
So supposedly, people have been eating food infested with dollops of S. marcescens colonies??? Granted, our stomach kills germs to a certain extent, and they won’t trouble you till you ingest enough amount. But this is tricky because it’s an unknown mixed culture, infectious dose is different for each species, and it’s impossible to know what and how many cells we ingest. We have our immune system as a shield but how potent it is would differ from people to people. Personally, I just do the bare minimum to remove the contaminated part and eat the rest but that’s just me pulling a Russian Roullete as per my way of life (teladanku Donna yang makan dari tempat sampah dan baik-baik aja). But some bread trickling with red slime.. If it was really (most probably mixed culture including) S. marcescens as suggested, that’s a LOT of bacterial cells, like a few tens of billions more than what contamination we’d eat accidentally in general. Well, the origin of the practice is ancient, there’s no need to worry about the health of anyone who actually ate that anymore. I learned that people only use the symbolism and eat the wafer as it is now, to my relief.
I never give much thought to it but within written human history, microbes are always there, recorded or not. Microbes are that ubiquitous. They live on the surface of things and inside. Whatever condition we live in, stretch the range to the extreme and you’ll still be able to find microbes there. Going by number, we’re just a speck living in microbe’s world, and they’ve been around much much longer too. That being said, the probability of microbes’ history intertwining with ours seems high enough to expect interesting things. Microbewiki might have much more fun to offer than I thought.
