Does the term “biochemical adaptations” mean both structural and functional adaptations, or only functional?
The trouble with this question is that structural and functional adaptations are mostly the same thing, as structural adaptations mostly have a function. For example, in humans, the foot is about 90 degrees to the lower leg, which is a structural adaptation. It’s function is to allow us to walk upright, so it is a functional adaptation that is also a structural adaptation. I’m not sure what level of biology that you are studying at the moment, so I’ll do my best to simplify and explain the biochemical bit. Basically, all any living things are just little bags of complicated chemicals, or in our case, made up of many, many little bags of chemicals, the cells. Inside any cell, including a bacterial cell, which is what I guess what the microbes mostly are, there are lots of complicated chemical compounds that are involved in chemical reactions within that cell, that basically make it ‘alive’, and allow them to do all the things that cells do. What it means by ‘biochemical adaptions’ is th
