What are heterotrophic and autotrophic?
First of all, they are both ecological terms. Self-support, simply put, is to support yourself. Autotrophic organisms live and reproduce by inorganic nutrition. They use the energy obtained from chemical dark reactions such as respiration or photochemical reactions for carbon assimilation. Autotrophic organisms are divided into chemoautotroph and photoautotroph. Representative examples of autotrophic microorganisms are red sulfur-free bacteria, red sulfur bacteria, green sulfur bacteria, nitrifying bacteria, sulfur bacteria, hydrogen bacteria, iron bacteria, carbon monoxide bacteria and so on. In autotrophic microorganisms, like hydrogen bacteria, with the substitution of available electron donors (for example, acetic acid is generated from hydrogen), it is sometimes seen that carbonic acid assimilation replaces reductive assimilation of organic nutrients (acetic acid, etc.). The same mechanism of carbon fixed cycle and energy acquisition system, and the regulation mechanism of autotrophic organisms' adaptive function to organic matter are being compared with photosynthetic organisms in order to clarify biochemically.
Heterotrophication is a way of life corresponding to autotrophy. Heterotrophs refers to those organisms that can only take the ready-made organic matter in the external environment (organic matter is produced by autotrophs) as the source of energy and carbon, ingest these organic matters into the body, transform them into their own components, and store energy. Such as: fungi living in saprophytic and parasitic life, most kinds of bacteria and more advanced animals and plants.