If you put a liquid with bacteria in it between two flat metal plates and applied like 100tons of force how much (if any) of the bacteria would survive?
In: Biology
You technically can squish a bacteria, but most surfaces at a microscopic level are not very smooth in the slightest, so you can’t sterilize a surface by crushing it.
Technically yes, but the challenge would be actually doing that.
Even the smoothest surface you’re likely to find would look like a mountain range under a microscope, so bacteria would just be chilling in all the crevices.
Some food is pasteurized by a process called high pressure processing. It uses pressure of up to 50,000 psi to kill bacteria, yeast and mold. More details are [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascalization)
Most would survive if using solid objects to try and crush them. However, if you contained it and pressurized the vessel of liquid and bacteria, it would kill all of them pretty easy.
others have answered about squishing it, but for the other part, liquid is not easily compressible. very high pressure can compress water by a very small amount, like in the deep oceans. bacteria are cells and is made up mostly of water, so applying pressure to the water would not harm the bacteria. there are plenty of bacteria (and fish too) living in the deepest oceans
Key is something called force per unit area, basically even if you apply a large force the bacteria has a small size and volume so unless the force is focused on the bacteria hardly any of that force will be applied to the bacteria, on top of this the bacteria is basically a tough bag of water which is resistant to being crushed.
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