Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and this is a special episode because
Speaker 1: a while back, iHeartRadio and the Metaverse invited me to
Speaker 1: come to a video that was released exclusively on Roadblocks
Speaker 1: and Fortnite, and in it they let me go on
Speaker 1: pretty much as much as I wanted about bacteria. It
Speaker 1: was a dream I never knew I had, so that
Speaker 1: was a thing that I did. But now we wanted
Speaker 1: to bring that script and all of the weird stuff
Speaker 1: in it to you, because, Okay, bacteria are tiny organisms
Speaker 1: that only consist of a single cell, without so much
Speaker 1: as a cell nucleus to direct them. Yet they do
Speaker 1: incredible things. They're all around us and inside us doing
Speaker 1: cool stuff of their own accord. But we humans have
Speaker 1: also harnessed them to do all kinds of work for us.
Speaker 1: We've talked here before about the dirt bacteria response for petrocore,
Speaker 1: which is the smell after a rain, and the gut
Speaker 1: bacteria that lets squirrels build muscle even while they hibernate,
Speaker 1: and the cyanobacteria that turned Earth's ancient ocean's pink for
Speaker 1: eons before green algae hit the scene. Also over on
Speaker 1: another podcast I do called Sabor, we talk all the
Speaker 1: time about how the byproducts of bacteria that are just
Speaker 1: living their lives help produce some of our favorite foods
Speaker 1: and flavors, from tangy cheeses to crunchy pickles to rich
Speaker 1: chocolate and coffee. And that's just stuff that we've already covered. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to go on a tour of the bacterial microverse.
Speaker 1: Let's start our tour on a perhaps uncomfortably personal level,
Speaker 1: of the bacteria in your guts. Okay, the community of
Speaker 1: microorganisms that lives on and inside you is known as
Speaker 1: the human microbiome. It's perhaps surprisingly large. Back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: scientists estimated that on average, you probably have slightly more
Speaker 1: bacterial cells in your body than you have cells of
Speaker 1: your own. A healthy microbiome helps your skin stay clear,
Speaker 1: your guts, digest food, your immune system, learn how to fight.
Speaker 1: Healthy gut microbes even seem to help reduce people's anxiety
Speaker 1: and improve their mood. And research suggests that our microbiomes
Speaker 1: have their own circadium rhythms just like we do, and
Speaker 1: that these daily rhythms have a lot of impact on
Speaker 1: our hell circadium rhythms are in organisms patterns of activity
Speaker 1: and arrest throughout any given day and night. Okay, a
Speaker 1: few years back, there was a study done in mice
Speaker 1: using cutting edge DNA sequencing technology. The research team found
Speaker 1: that the microbial communities living in the guts of mice
Speaker 1: have a pretty regular routine. Different types of bacteria hang
Speaker 1: out in their own areas of the intestines in the morning,
Speaker 1: move around during the day, and end up in a
Speaker 1: different place at then do it all over again. So
Speaker 1: each part of a mouse's gut experiences differences in numbers
Speaker 1: and species of bacteria over a twenty four hour period.
Speaker 1: And that's not all. And this migration affected organs in
Speaker 1: the mice that weren't even close to the gut. For example,
Speaker 1: the daily rhythms of those gut bacteria, depending on the
Speaker 1: time of day, changed the liver's ability to do its
Speaker 1: job producing useful stuff and getting rid of waste. This
Speaker 1: isn't just super weird, which it is, It could eventually
Speaker 1: help doctors understand how the time of day and the
Speaker 1: health of your microbiome may make a difference in treating
Speaker 1: some diseases. Also, the researchers found that the mouse's own
Speaker 1: circadian rhythms were essentially driven by those of its microbiome.
Speaker 1: There was no separating the two. They said that we
Speaker 1: should all think of ourself and our microbiome as a
Speaker 1: single supra organism. But as much as we're still learning
Speaker 1: about the bacteria that are most personal to us, humans
Speaker 1: have figured out a lot of ways to put other
Speaker 1: bacteria to work. Even though most are too small to
Speaker 1: be seen without a microscope, their strength is in their numbers.
Speaker 1: If you can convince bacteria to produce a certain substance,
Speaker 1: and you can get them to thrive, a colony of
Speaker 1: bacteria will produce that substance for you. On an industrial scale.
Speaker 1: Everything from flavorings used in the food industry to human
Speaker 1: insulin is made this way. Take butter flavoring. Originally, butter
Speaker 1: was butter flavored because of helpful bacteria cultures that aid
Speaker 1: in transforming liquid milk into this solid fat, which is butter.
Speaker 1: As those bacteria worked, they also happened to excrete compounds
Speaker 1: that we humans experience as flavors. Butter flavor is bacteria poop. However,
Speaker 1: a lot of butter sold these days, certainly in the
Speaker 1: United States, is what's called sweet cream butter which has
Speaker 1: not gone through a bacterial culturing process and thus doesn't
Speaker 1: taste particularly buttery. Some of this is just sold as is,
Speaker 1: but some of it has butter flavor added in, and
Speaker 1: in order to make that butter flavoring, sometimes scientists create
Speaker 1: it in a lab that's called artificial flavoring. But sometimes
Speaker 1: they turn back to bacteria and use bacterial colonies to
Speaker 1: produce the flavor molecules that can be labeled natural flavoring.
Speaker 1: And of course we apply both of these types, natural
Speaker 1: and artificial to all kinds of baked goods, candies, and
Speaker 1: popcorn seasonings. But we bend bacteria to for experimental uses too.
Speaker 1: For example, take the team up of glowing bacteria and
Speaker 1: lasers to detect and then disarm land mines. There may
Speaker 1: be more than one hundred million land mines lurking underground
Speaker 1: in former conflict zones around the world, and for a
Speaker 1: long time, the best way to remove them was by
Speaker 1: sending a volunteer into a mine field with a metal detector.
Speaker 1: Not ideal. That's why a team of researchers engineered E.
Speaker 1: Coli bacteria that glow when they encounter vapors from buried
Speaker 1: land mines and other unexploded devices. It turns out that
Speaker 1: all land mines leak explosive vapors that build up in
Speaker 1: the soil directly above these devices. The living bacteria are
Speaker 1: placed inside tiny polymer beads that drones then scatter across
Speaker 1: the minefields. When they encounter the land mines's emissions, the
Speaker 1: bacteria begin to fluoresce, and the researchers can use a
Speaker 1: laser based system to map the terrain and identify danger zones.
Speaker 1: Once the land mines have been found, specially trained humans
Speaker 1: are still the most effective at disarming them, though robots
Speaker 1: have also been engineered for the task. Meanwhile, other researchers
Speaker 1: in other labs are tackling whole other problems, like shortages
Speaker 1: of blood for transfusions. So, okay, humans have various blood types.
Speaker 1: If you need a transfusion, say you're injured in an
Speaker 1: accident or you're in the operating room awaiting a procedure,
Speaker 1: you need the right type of blood, either the same
Speaker 1: type as your own or type O negative, which is
Speaker 1: considered universal, which means that everyone's body will accept it.
Speaker 1: You can't give someone a transfusion of just any old
Speaker 1: type of blood. Because red blood cells come with different
Speaker 1: types of sugar molecules on their surface, and this is
Speaker 1: what makes transfusions troublesome. Type B blood, for example, naturally
Speaker 1: contains antibodies that will make your immune system attack the
Speaker 1: sugars that occur on type A blood cells and vice versa,
Speaker 1: and you do not want your immune system attacking your
Speaker 1: new blood. Type O blood has neither of these sugars
Speaker 1: on its surface, so it isn't attacked by anyone's immune system,
Speaker 1: which is why Type O is in such great demand.
Speaker 1: So some researchers out of Vancouver figured that if they
Speaker 1: could destroy those pesky sugars, they could create typo blood
Speaker 1: from any type of blood. And to find that weapon
Speaker 1: of sugary destruction, we're going to have to go back
Speaker 1: into your gut. In the walls of our intestines, there
Speaker 1: are bacteria known to feed on similar sugars. So the
Speaker 1: researchers got some samples of poop, isolated the bacteria, sequenced
Speaker 1: their DNA, and found the genetic code for the enzymes
Speaker 1: that the bacteria used to break down those sugars when
Speaker 1: they eat them, and it worked. Research is ongoing to
Speaker 1: make sure it's safe and scalable, but this could help
Speaker 1: make blood shortages a thing of the past. A side
Speaker 1: note here, I've been talking a lot today about genetic engineering,
Speaker 1: which is a little bit controversial in some circles, mostly
Speaker 1: due to fears and misunderstandings about what it entails. But
Speaker 1: the thing is, it's just a technology. Can it be
Speaker 1: used to a response. Sure. Like any tool, genetic engineering
Speaker 1: can be used for good or ill. Like the same
Speaker 1: telephone technology that keeps you in touch with your grandma
Speaker 1: can also be used to scam your grandma. Genetic engineering
Speaker 1: is just another type of tool, and it can be
Speaker 1: used for awesome stuff or to scam grandma. But okay,
Speaker 1: back to bacteria. Of course, not all of them are helpful.
Speaker 1: Figuring out how to deal with ones that can make
Speaker 1: us sick is tricky because they're generally really good at
Speaker 1: what they do, and again, their strength is in numbers
Speaker 1: and in quick life cycles. In the course of a
Speaker 1: human lifetime, generations upon generations of bacteria can evolutionarily adapt
Speaker 1: to resist our best weapons against them, like antibiotics. So
Speaker 1: as you may have heard, traditional antibiotics are becoming less
Speaker 1: effective at helping us stop bacterial infections. Antibiotics work by
Speaker 1: slowing down or killing bacteria to the point that your
Speaker 1: immune system can fight off an infection. But the specific
Speaker 1: ways that a lot of the classics work tend to
Speaker 1: be easily foiled by evolution. For example, lots of antibiotics
Speaker 1: destroy bacteria by basically poking holes in their outer cell walls.
Speaker 1: The critter's stronger cell walls survive and multiply, and future
Speaker 1: generations aren't as likely to be harmed by poking. This
Speaker 1: is a major problem because, okay, look, humans only discovered
Speaker 1: antibiotics in nineteen twenty eight, less than one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: The ability of antibiotics to fight bacterial disease seemed so
Speaker 1: rad that for decades we threw them at everything, even
Speaker 1: mild infections, or to prevent possible infections in healthy farm animals,
Speaker 1: or as a placebo in patients who had viral infections
Speaker 1: yet demanded medicine. That's how we've wound up with antibiotic
Speaker 1: resistant infections like methylne resistance Straphylococcus aureus also called MRS
Speaker 1: because that's a lot easier to say. This is a
Speaker 1: germ that used to just cause skin infections but can
Speaker 1: now be deadly in hospital patients. So scientists are looking
Speaker 1: into all kinds of new sources of antibiotics that might
Speaker 1: work in different ways, like compounds that they've isolated from
Speaker 1: cockroach brains or frog skin or platypus milk. I would
Speaker 1: not kid you about platypus milk. But researchers are also
Speaker 1: talking about switching from the brute force tactics of antibiotics
Speaker 1: to actually outsmarting bacteria. But okay, how do you outsmart
Speaker 1: something that doesn't have a brain or even a cell nucleus.
Speaker 1: It turns out that despite all of this, bacteria do
Speaker 1: communicate with each other. They're not texting emoji. This is
Speaker 1: called quorum sensing. A quorum is the minimum number of
Speaker 1: team members that you need to get something done, like
Speaker 1: play basketball, or turn on or off different bits of
Speaker 1: genetic code that might, for example, make a bacterium more
Speaker 1: or less virulent to an infected host, or maybe it
Speaker 1: makes the bacterium form a protective spores around itself. A
Speaker 1: bacteria can sense a quorum through signaling molecules. These are
Speaker 1: called autoinducers. The bacteria create and then emit them, either
Speaker 1: passively or actively, depending on the situation, and so as
Speaker 1: the bacterial population grows, so does the concentration of autoinducers
Speaker 1: in their environment. Once it reaches a concentration detectable by
Speaker 1: the bacteria, the signal is received and the bacteria make
Speaker 1: a change for the good of themselves and the colony.
Speaker 1: Also a fun and or terrifying fact, bacteria are not
Speaker 1: limited to communicating with their own species. Some of these
Speaker 1: signals work among different species of bacteria. This isn't always cooperative.
Speaker 1: Some bacteria seem to engage in quorum sensing space pionage
Speaker 1: while competing for resources. Anyway, lots of different research teams
Speaker 1: are studying quorum sensing and looking for ways to disrupt
Speaker 1: it or to artificially stimulate it in order to pass
Speaker 1: false information around bacterial colonies. So they're looking into the
Speaker 1: chemicals and enzymes used in the process, plus mechanisms that
Speaker 1: bacteria have for creating and detecting them. But okay, all
Speaker 1: of the bacterial shenanigans that we have discussed so far
Speaker 1: today are happening right under, or on or in our noses.
Speaker 1: But there are whole other bacterial worlds out there, and
Speaker 1: one of them is deep under our own. An international
Speaker 1: group of over a thousand scientists spent ten years uncovering
Speaker 1: the secrets of deep life, a stunningly diverse population of
Speaker 1: microscopic organisms miles inside Earth's surface. Some of those bacteria
Speaker 1: and other mostly single celled organisms, live off of little
Speaker 1: more than the energy of surrounding rocks and can survive
Speaker 1: in temperatures hotter than boiling water. The project is called
Speaker 1: Deep Carbon Observatory, and it aims to understand how carbon,
Speaker 1: of this element that is essential to life as we
Speaker 1: know it, forms and moves within the Earth. They estimate
Speaker 1: the amount of carbon underneath the surface is hundreds of
Speaker 1: times more than the carbon in every human being combined.
Speaker 1: During the course of their studies, the scientists drilled over
Speaker 1: one and a half miles that's two and a half
Speaker 1: kilometers into the seafloor. They captured samples and mines and
Speaker 1: boreholes from depths more than twice that. They took the
Speaker 1: data from hundreds of sites to get an idea of
Speaker 1: one ecosystem in subterranean rock. Looks like the biosphere that
Speaker 1: they've uncovered is thought to be twice the volume of
Speaker 1: all of our oceans. This new world underneath the surface
Speaker 1: may be even more diverse than life on Earth. Yet
Speaker 1: these might robes are nothing like life on Earth. Many
Speaker 1: have life cycles measured in geologic terms. The implications of
Speaker 1: these findings are wide ranging. These organisms can live and
Speaker 1: thrive in highly pressurized environments with few nutrients, and in
Speaker 1: temperatures that would kill organisms on the surface. They may
Speaker 1: now give us clues about the possibility of life in
Speaker 1: other areas, including on other planets. But on this world,
Speaker 1: where we, again, unfortunately often try to exterminate all bacteria.
Speaker 1: A team of scientists is designing a germ bank where
Speaker 1: microbes can be stored out of harm's way and possibly
Speaker 1: used to ward off disease in the future. The vault's
Speaker 1: official name is the Microbiotic Vault. It would be used
Speaker 1: to preserve microbes that are at risk of being wiped
Speaker 1: off the planet as civilization moves into areas where nature
Speaker 1: once ruled. Microbes that we don't even know about yet,
Speaker 1: and catalog variants of more familiar ones. After all, the
Speaker 1: bacteria in and around us have co evolved with us
Speaker 1: for hundreds of thousands of years. They help us make
Speaker 1: our food and digest our food. They can help us
Speaker 1: manufacture life saving medicines and discover new solutions to all
Speaker 1: kinds of problems. The least we can do is return
Speaker 1: the favor because we have so much more to learn
Speaker 1: from them. Today's episode is based on a number of
Speaker 1: articles on HowStuffWorks dot com, including using glowing bacteria and
Speaker 1: lasers to detect landlines written by Loreel Dove. How close
Speaker 1: are we to creating a universal blood type? Written by
Speaker 1: John Donovan, How do bacteria Communicate? Written by Molly Edmunds.
Speaker 1: Ten weirdest sources for antibiotics written by Patrick J. Kiger,
Speaker 1: And scientists call for a Global germ Bank written by
Speaker 1: Chris Opford. But there's also some additional material written by me.
Speaker 1: For more about how bacteria poop makes our food, check
Speaker 1: out my other podcast as Saver and Hey, thanks to
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio for the opportunity to visit iheartland in the metaverse,
Speaker 1: which gave me the excuse to write this strange script.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is producted of iHeartRadio in partnership with Houstifforks
Speaker 1: dot com. It is produced by Tyler klang A. Four
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.