Hi, my name’s Coli. Now please don’t bother trying to find me. You won’t be able to see me with your eyes. As far as you’re concerned, I’m invisible. Where am I? If you’d really like to know, I’m sitting on the tip of your supposedly clean index finger.

If three hundred of us were to form a line, then the chain would have a length of 1 mm and if you were looking very closely you might just spot it. If we lined up like this in a thousand rows all next to one another, we would still only take up the space of one square millimetre.

Actually my full name is really Coliform bacteria. Where did I get a name like Coliform? I suppose it’s because I spend most of my time in your intestine. Please don’t be offended by my home background. You see, together with millions of my kind, I play an important part in your nutrition. In your intestine, I break down all the unusable items in your food so that they can be absorbed by the intestinal walls. I hope you don’t mind if I help myself while I’m at it. After all, we do a lot more for you than just that. Provided there are enough of us, we protect you against hostile and sickness inducing micro-organisms. We are only harmful in tissues outside of the intestine. So be a little more careful with me and don’t forget your personal hygiene.

As you can’t see me, I’d like to give you a brief description of myself. Please forgive me if I exaggerate a little. Imagine a large loaf of bread with 6 hefty ropes at one end, which are all at least 2 metres long. If you take a closer look at these ropes, you’ll notice that they all leave the loaf at right angles. Now just imagine the ropes revolving very quickly, at up to 100 r.p.m. That’s about twice as fast as the generators that make domestic electricity.

The rope or flagellum, as it’s more correctly known, is built up like a round chimney, in which the bricks wind in spirals right up to the top. If you imagine the chimney with a cross-section of one metre then based on this scale it would have to be a thousand metres high. The bricks correspond to the molecules in the flagellum. Of course the molecules are interconnected much more elastically than the bricks in a chimney. Now imagine that the chimney itself is rotating at breakneck speed. Remember, in reality, my flagellum is at most two hundreds of a millimetre long.

My Creator certainly built the most wonderful and highly integrated things into me. I can live, move about, feed myself, multiply and be of service to humanity at the same time! Even the makeup of my harmless looking cell wall is extremely complex. Besides the various membranes, there’s a layer of proteins, a support skeleton, polysaccharide, a lipid layer, and much more. My DNA chain, where my Creator stored the necessary information, is approximately a thousand times longer than myself. Can you imagine how ingeniously the molecular structure was packaged so that it could fit inside me, not to mention the information density. Did you know that my DNA chain contains about as many characters as are in your Bible?

Figure 4: Escherichia coli – the most commonly-known bacteria. The detailed diagram explains how the parts of the motor which rotates the bacterial appendage (lat. flagellum = whip) are arranged.

I can’t go into all of my astonishing details right now, but I just have to tell you more about my six rotating electric motors. These are essential to my mobility. Like any electric motor they have a stator, rotor and the necessary housing. The axle sits vertically on the membrane surface and is built into two neighbouring membranes of the cell wall. (See figure 4) The inner membrane forms the non-conducting layer (dielectric) of the capacitor, which is on the outside positively and on the inside negatively charged. A voltage of 0.2 V is generated. Positively charged particles (hydrogen ions) flow inside and thus drive the motor with electric energy. I’m able to run my motors both forwards and backwards and, with the help of my rotating flagella, I can attain a velocity of 200 microns per second (0.2 mm/s); that’s equivalent to swimming my own body-length 65 times a second (not including the flagella). If you’d like to compare this with your own swimming pace, it would be the equivalent of jetting through the water at 400 km/h.

Some of you think that this ingenious motor came about through mutation and selection. But don’t forget, as long as one part remains incomplete, all other ‘developments’ are useless. A rotation motor that can’t rotate has no advantages.

There’s another thing I’d like to let you in on – my function as a ‘chemical’ taxi! My Creator gave me the ability to actively locate the area of highest food concentration and to subsequently swim there. I also notice when I’m facing waste materials and thus avoid them. That’s why I’ve been fitted with a highly intricate navigation system, which provides my six motors with the necessary control signals. Of course, without a navigation system my motors would eventually lead me up the creek. A navigation system without a motor is just as useless. What use is it to know where the food is, if you can’t get to it.

My navigation system has a parallel in your life. The greatest goal that the Creator has given you is eternal life. What use would it be to you, to know that there is eternal life with God, if you had no possibility of getting there. Be assured, that just as the Creator has given me the motor system to get to my food, He sent you Jesus Christ as the way to the source of life. If you’ll believe in Him as your Lord and God, you will receive eternal life.