Beneficial. we already went through some of their activities: nitrogen fixation, oxygen production. By the way, microbes produce much greater oxygen than trees. A lot of people lose sight of that and the various cycles critical to our balance of life on earth. Microbes are key in these cycles. Sulfur, carbon, nitrogen cycles, and again, I'll just say it again, microorganisms are an absolute requirement for life as we know it. For instance, when I visit kids at school, I always point out that if we didn't have the microbes that digested protein and so forth, we would have piles of dinosaurs and everything else piled outside in our great vast areas. So microbes take care of all that. Food production. I'm going to mention a few used in cheese production. If you like blue cheese, later I'll show you an example of the Penicillium from blue cheese. Lactic acid bacteria produce yogurt, cottage cheese. The organism used to make cottage cheese is Streptococcus lactis. Yes, I said Streptococcus. Not all streptococci produce disease. Streplactis produces a nice food product. Again, as I said before less than five percent of all microbes produce disease; it's probably considerably less than five.

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