Question: Allan what types of alcohol do you use as food by bacteria and why do you use that type?happy birthday

Allan Pang answered on 28 Jun 2012:

The bacteria when exposed in certain condition (presence of alcohol), it’s triggered to make some small “machineries” within their cell, which I call them bacterial microcompartment.

There are several types of bacterial microcompartments; but they appear the same way. However, the slight difference is that they make use of different types of alcohols.

These are: ethanol, ethanolamine and 1,2-propanediol.

Remember that any (if not all) chemicals that ends with -ol is an alcohol. I am pretty sure you are familiar with ethanol, because it is used in alcoholic drinks. Ethanolamine is just an ethanol with an extra nitrogen. While 1,2-propanediol is a “bigger version” of ethanol (you can think of 1,2-propanediol as a molecule with 2 ethanols) – this is usually used as anti-freeze.

Inside the bacterial microcompartment, these alcohols are converted to different chemical, which at a later stage can be process by the bacteria for use of energy (= food!).

So how come they can process different types of alcohols? Well, it is because of evolution! They probably started out similar, then branch out to use different alcohol depending on the environment where bacteria are. So, there will be some bacteria which has a bacterial microcompartment that can process ethanol; the others ethanolamine while the rest is 1,2-propanediol!

We suspect that there are some more other bacteria that could have evolved to process other alcohol or chemicals, but we don’t know that yet. This area of research is quite new, so need some more work!