Aside for them being good/bad for our body, do they have names? Like the electric charges making protons having positive charge while electrons having negative charges. I was brushing my teeth knowing I have good and bad bacteria in my mouth, are there too many bacteria to name them with something else?
In: Biology
They do have names, but the names themselves don’t usually indicate that they’re bad or good. Good bacteria can cause problems if they end up places where they aren’t supposed to be. One such example is E. Coli, which causes problems if it ends up being ingested. This can happen from food contamination.
Absolutely they have names, its just that there is more than one kind of each. They are categories. The comparison to electrical charges doesnt work as there is only one charge carrying particle thats positive, and one thats negative. Theres a whole host of different kinds in every part of your body. If you want to research the topic, look into the human microbiome.
Biochemist here. Good/bad bacteria is not an official designation, it’s just a very simple metaphor to try and explain to people that we are all completely full of and covered with bacteria all of the time, but only a small proportion is harmful. Most people associate the word “bacteria” with something harmful, so referring to some of it as “good bacteria” mostly serves to calm people down.
A more specific term would be “pathogenic bacteria” for the bacteria that is harmful to humans. I can’t post links here, but Wikipedia has a list of pathogenic bacteria if you’re curious. And while they often belong to the same families, there’s no singular quality that they all have in common besides the ability to infect humans. So to answer your electric charge analogy, there’s not an intrinsic physical marker or quality that makes it obvious which ones are bad. If you scoop up some pond water and look at it in a microsope, it’s never obvious which ones are dangerous. Over millions of years of evolution, some of them learned to thrive by infecting humans, while others didn’t, but it’s hard to tell them apart until someone gets sick.
Your body is mostly made up of not your cells. Most bacteria are harmless meaning they dont have major impact your daily running of the body. All bacteria complete chemical reactions as part of life process. Some reactions are beneficial like breaking down starches into sugars your body can process or making chemical compounds that your body can’t produce by itself. Some reactions are bad because they disrupt your body process.
Its not that they are objectively good or bad, but not all bacteria that live in or on our bodies are harmful. You have thousands of species living in your gut that helps you with digestion for instance.
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