Mycoplasma

00:00 Mycoplasma, a bacteria.

00:03 Mycoplasma have distinction of being the smallest free living bacteria that we know about in Medical Science.

00:11 They are so small that they can pass through a 0.45 µm filter which actually gets pretty much all other living material including other small bacteria.

00:22 The mycoplasma are very special because they lack a peptidoglycan-containing cell wall.

00:29 Remember again that most, in fact all, beta-lactam antibiotics, the penicillins, the cephalosporins, could only work by binding to a peptidoglycan, a penicillin-binding protein.

00:42 But mycoplasma would not be able to be treated by a beta-lactam antibiotic because they lack that wall.

00:49 These organisms are pleomorphic in shape and you can see several different images of mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the types we'll talk about on the slide right now.

00:59 They are not visualized with gram-stain to begin, because there's not much in their cell wall to be even stained and they require special growth materials including sterols to be isolated.

01:11 The two human pathogens that we'll talk about in this session are mycoplasma pneumoniae and mycoplasma hominis.

01:19 Mycoplasma pneumoniae is reflected in the image on the left, mycoplasma hominis on the right.