Prokaryotes!

[NewtoBiology]

Hello everyone,

If anyone could throw some ideas at me I would be so grateful!!!

I am studying prokaryotes and their nutritional diversity in comparison to eukaryotes. My question is WHY are prokaryotes so much more nutritionally diverse??

I can imagine it is due to:

a. single celled, simpler structure, smaller in size
b. Prokaryotes can be found anywhere


But is that really answering the questions?!?!? Or am I just rambling.

Any ideas or direction?

THANK YOU!!!

[mith]

you mean like they eat more things?

[NewtoBiology]

I mean that prokaryotes can be autotrophs, photoautrophs, chemoautotrophs, heterotrophs, whereas eukaryotes are not.

[mith]

Huh really? If you consider plants, the only one that eukaryotes don't really do is chemoautotroph.

A broader question you should ask is why are bacteria so diverse? From that I think you can argue why they eat more things.

[Cat]

Fast generation time (e.g. 20 min for E.coli) allows fast evolution toward the gain of beneficial mutations in the new environment.
Ability to exchange plasmids/genes with other bacteria to acquire new phenotypes.