This is really a follow-up on an article that covers Miniprep protocol in detail because I made an embarrassingly careless mistake. Long story short, I claimed that bacteria undergo apoptosis, which is completely incorrect! Apoptosis is specific to multicellular organisms that possess tissues. Bacteria do not. They are unicellular and undergo a different mechanism of cell death called necrosis. Although both processes achieve the same goal – cell death, they do so by two entirely different mechanisms, and this difference is important to multicellular organisms.

See, necrosis is a messy process. A cell screams, “I, I, I just can’t take it anymore!” and then proceeds to literally burst and release all of its contents into the surrounding atmosphere without a care for how gruesome and violent it may be to its neighbors. Apoptosis, on the other hand, is an extremely regulated process during which the cell Read more »