1St Person Narrative About Chlamydia
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1St Person Narrative About Chlamydia
Chlamydia
Hello there! My name is Chlamydia trachomatis; you can call me trachomatis for short. These really smart people you humans like to call scientists in 1907 identified me. They told me I was a bacteria. Now, when people think of bacteria they think if itsy bitsy things, and that's true we are very tiny. About one thousand of us could fit in the little millimeter space on a ruler! Now that I have been alive a while, I have learned that human consider bacteria bad or gross, but really I'm just doing what it takes for me to stay alive.
I enter the body through vaginal, anal, or oral sexual intercourse, and most babies whose mother that I have infected will also get me, even before they are born. Almost immediately from entering the body, I start to reproduce. I reproduce asexually using a process known as binary fission, where the single chromosome that makes up the DNA in me is reproduced as an identical copy of the original. Then I split in two (it is not painful because I am very flexible. I mean, all I am is a microorganism that lacks a nucleus and has a cell wall composed of a protein-sugar molecule). Each half of me then receives one of the chromosomes, thus creating a twin of me. Because binary fission does not allow me to make the genetic changes necessary for mutation and survival in a changing environment, I must utilize different methods for evolvement. I am so advanced, that I can obtain new DNA from the remains of a decomposing bacterium, through a process called conjugation. Conjugation is when I take DNA from another bacterial relative through a tube. It might sound gross but it really isn't after you do it a couple times. After the first couple weeks of hanging around and reproducing, we might start to give the human symptoms to let them know we are there.
Every year my family infects about three million people, but we don't even give half of them symptoms to let them know that we are in their body. In...
- Submitted by: stephanieavery
- Date Submitted: 03/08/2008 01:20 PM
- Category: Science
- Words: 1091
- Pages: 5
- Views: 1799
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