If a person places his or her hand on a hot stove:

Applications Of Microbes

1] In Household Products

You must have seen people add a small amount of curd to fresh milk. In time, this milk at suitable temperature then turns into curd! How does this happen? This is due to the action of microorganisms called Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB).

The small amount of curd added as a starter culture to milk contains millions of these bacteria, which multiply at suitable temperatures turning milk into curd. LAB also improve the nutritional value of milk by increasing vitamin B12. They also play a significant role in keeping a check on disease-causing microbes in our gut.

Other uses of microorganisms in our household products include the dough used to make idli or dosa. Similarly, the dough used to make bread is fermented using baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). The process of fermentation produces CO2 which gives the bread the puffed-up appearance. Toddy (a drink in southern India) is also the result of microbial activity on sap from palms.

Other uses involve fermentation of fish, bamboo-shoots and soybean. Another product made using microorganisms is cheese. For example, the large holes seen in ‘Swiss cheese’ is due to the amount of CO2 produced by the bacterium Propionibacterium sharmanii