Say for example you press your finger hard against something, desk, laptop or phone would that pressure “smoosh” the bacteria or any other microscopic organisms?
In: 281
Yes, but not with your finger, or any other soft or porous surface.
Everyday objects are not smooth on those scales. You’d need a very non-porous surface like polished metal to actually apply much pressure to something that small in the first place (otherwise you’d just squish it into whatever tiny dents exist in the material), and contact that tight between two surfaces starts to result in some weird behavior (like the fact that now you’re compressing the hell out of a very thin layer of air between them). Flesh, wood, fabric, or other organic materials won’t do; you need polished metal or glass.
Even then, cells are just sacks of water for the most part, and water is very hard to compress, so the “squishing” here is breaking the cell wall, not squishing it flat. Imagine taking a water balloon and diving underwater in a pool and trying to pop it by squishing it. It’s not *impossible*, but it’s pretty hard to do. So you need to be applying pressure pretty straight down and not have any gaps the bacterium can slide into.
That said, very hard, smooth surfaces can do it, especially for the larger bacteria. It’s quite possible to squash a large cell like an amoeba (not a bacterium, but still) between the glass plates when trying to view it under a microscope, for example. But most bacteria are so small that you need an extremely smooth surface to do it, because the irregularities even in glass or metal start being roughly the same size as the bacteria!
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