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
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.
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