At this point in writing your tutorial, you have to find a way to get across to the students the importance of a cell wall to a bacterium. How do you convey that the bacterial cell will be at the
mercy of its environment? The cell wall will need to act as a support mechanism to neutralize the inflow or outflow of water that would
alter the shape of the cell. The cell cannot search out
for a better place in the environment that has more available
water, or if there is water that it has a high enough solute concentration that the cell
will not gain water. Because that's the
problem for a bacterial cell, it cannot control the
tonicity due to solute concentrations in the surrounding water. Water will
flow in or out depending on solute concentrations and the only
thing a bacterial cell can do to
keep from collapsing due to water loss or rupturing due to too much water coming in is to have a strong
cell wall that will hold its shape regardless of the
osmotic pressures. The rigidity of the
cell wall will maintain a set shape regardless of water flow. The proteins and lipids that anchor
the cytoplasmic membrane to the cell wall will tether
the membrane to the
peptidoglycan layer so that when environmental conditions result in the loss of water from the cell, the
membrane will not collapse in on itself. Similarly, changes in
environmental
conditions that would result in the inflow of water would expand the volume of the cell to the limits
of the cell wall and no more
The composition of the cell wall allows for the expansion and contraction of the cell
wall in response to the gain or loss of water from the cell
Is this statement True or False?
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True
False