ABSTRACT
This chapter will serve as a primer for those new to microbiology and as an updated reference for those familiar with the science. The discipline of microbiology has advanced rapidly since the refinement of Galileo’s light microscope by Van Leeuwenhoek (1674), the disproving of spontaneous generation by Pasteur (1861), the elucidation of the links between specific microbes and human diseases by Koch (1876), and the discovery of viruses by Ivanovsky and Beijerinck (1892). The rate of discovery since the early 1800s represents a mirror of the development of the microbiological techniques used to culture, identify, and characterize microorganisms of all classes. Collectively, the combination of microbiologic techniques and the resulting description of the properties of microbes led to the evolution of impactful techniques of detection of microbes and development of methods for the prevention and treatment of human infectious diseases. While modern microbiology focuses on bacteria (living prokaryotic organisms) and viruses (non-living biologic entities), prions (infectious proteins), protozoa (unicellular eukaryotes), fungi (unicellular and multicellular eukaryotes), and helminths (multi-cellular eukaryotic worms) are generally studied under the microbiology umbrella. This chapter will focus on bacteria and fungi and the methods to detect the presence of bacterial and fungal organisms.
