Microbiology exam 3

Sterilization: Process that destroys or removes all viable microorganisms (including viruses)

Disinfection: Physical processor a chemical agent to destroy vegetative pathogens but not bacterial endospores Removes harmful products of microorganisms (toxins) from material

Decontamination/Sanitization: Cleansing technique that mechanically removes microorganisms as well as other debris to reduce contamination to safe level

Antisepsis/Degermation: Reduces the number of microbes on the human skin A form of decontamination but on living tissue

Autoclaving involves: steam

Gamma and X rays are: Ionizing radiation

Bacteristatic: chemical agents that prevent the growth of bacteria on tissues or on
objects in the environment

Thermal death time: shortest length of time required to kill all microbes at a specific temperature

Thermal death point: lowest temperature required to kill all microbes in a sample in 10 MINUTES

Aqueous: chemicals dissolved in pure water as the solvent

Tinctures: chemicals dissolved in pure alcohol or alcohol-water mixtures)

Chlorine: kills endospores slowly, compounds combine with water and release HOCL to denature enzymes

Iodine: kills endospores slowly, penetrates cells and interferes with metabolic functions and hydrogen & disulfide bonding of proteins.

Quinine: principal malaria treatment, no single drug is universally effective.

Artemisinin: malaria treatment.

Probiotics: Preparations of live microorganisms fed to animals and humans to improve
intestinal biota

Fecal transplants: Used to treat recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection and ulcerative colitis

Microbiota: normal microbial colonists of healthy body surfaces, mostly harmless, few pathogens.

Broad spectrum antimicrobials: destroy good biota and pathogens

Superinfection: microbes that were small in number overgrow and cause disease.

True pathogens: capable of causing disease in healthy persons.

Virulence: degree of pathogenicity

Exoenzymes: secreted by microbes and damages host tissue.

Toxin: chemical product of microbes that’s poisonous to other organisms

Endotoxins: toxins inside bacteria cell that is released when cell lyses.

Incubation period: the time from initial contact with the infectious agent to the appearance of
symptoms

Selectively toxic: kill/inhibit microbes without damaging host tissue

Prodromal phase: 1-2 day period of earliest symptoms

Kirby-Bauer technique: agar plate zone of inhibition measurement

Convalescent period: Patient begins to respond to the infection and symptoms decline

Koch’s postulates: proofs that became standard of determining infectious disease causation

Reservoir: primary habitat in the world from which a pathogen originates (human, soil, etc).

Tetracycline antibiotics are: broad spectrum drugs.

Polymyxin is a: narrow spectrum drug

Ways drug resistance develops: spontaneous mutation and conjugation gene transfer