This section explains some important features of bacteria and how some of these features lead to some familar aspects of disease. To illustrate how important horseshoe crabs are to science we must first go back a few billion years and learn some basic information about bacteria. Here are a few facts that we can start with.
Bacteria are simple, single-celled organisms.
They have no organized organelles and genetic material is distributed throughout the inside of the cell. This complex of molecules is far more than a simple covering and it is where interesting things happen both for the bacteria and for us in our story. We will begin with picking out the bacteria we are interested in and separating them from the rest. Biological science is built upon classifying distinctions among organisms. One way scientists have grouped bacteria is by using a method called the Gram Stain.