Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, I think
Speaker 1: I'll call my boss. Then I'm gonna hack and cough
Speaker 1: and we'see, he'll swear. I got some strange disease. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, and I'm Joe McCormick and Lauren. It seems
Speaker 1: like you were just so eager to talk about bacteria.
Speaker 1: I always want to talk about bacteria. They do great stuff.
Speaker 1: They they make cheese possible kind of. They help us digesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they make us real sick sometimes that's the best. It's
Speaker 1: very important. Well yeah, sure, yes, we've talked about before
Speaker 1: about how bacteria actually make up more of us than
Speaker 1: we do. What by cell count mass? Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: by mass it's a thing like four pounds. It's it's
Speaker 1: not all that much. But yeah, we came across this
Speaker 1: really interesting article in Scientific American about bacteria, and even
Speaker 1: though we've kind of sort of talked about it a
Speaker 1: little bit in the past, I really wanted to do
Speaker 1: another episode about it because bacteria can talk to each
Speaker 1: other and that's so cool. But Before we get to that,
Speaker 1: let's do a quick overview on just what bacteria are
Speaker 1: and why, other than the pure scientific inquiry into how
Speaker 1: bacteria communicate, like how that would practically affect us, right, right,
Speaker 1: So first off, I mean this is going to be
Speaker 1: a review on like elementary science level, but it's important
Speaker 1: to build the foundation. Bacteria are very small organisms. Um wait,
Speaker 1: wait a second, yes, what do you mean small? So
Speaker 1: when we call say, Matt Frederick a bacterium, we're not
Speaker 1: meaning that literally because he's he's actually the size of
Speaker 1: many bacteria. How many more than four? Uh so at
Speaker 1: least three dozen? We're talking about usually a single cell organism, right,
Speaker 1: That's typically what bacteria are. Um. They lack though exactly
Speaker 1: that fact is going to become interestingly complicated. They lack
Speaker 1: chlorophyll because if they had chlorophyll, then they would be
Speaker 1: probably more along the lines of the plant kingdom than
Speaker 1: of their own. They actually belong to a kingdom called prokaryota,
Speaker 1: and that is they are they are not the only
Speaker 1: inhabitants of that kingdom. Um Way, they lack a nucleus,
Speaker 1: which is what puts them there. They're prokaryotic. That means
Speaker 1: that they do not have a nucleus or other membrane
Speaker 1: bound organelles inside of them cell command center. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're just sell soup inside kind of sort of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like you know, the or the cells that
Speaker 1: we are in us. They're you karyotic. They have a
Speaker 1: nucleus and membrane bound organelles and things like that. The
Speaker 1: other organism that within that kingdom is our chea. Those
Speaker 1: are the other prokaryotic organisms. So their DNA is just
Speaker 1: contained within the cell itself. There's no nucleus there to
Speaker 1: hold it, unlike ours. It's a circular chain of DNA
Speaker 1: molecules that inhabit the bacteria or bacteria um because that's
Speaker 1: the singular, right. How Come every time I searched for
Speaker 1: stock images of bacteria, they're like a few kinds. They're
Speaker 1: they're like the hot dog bacteria, and the cheese puff bacteria,
Speaker 1: and the and then I think some spiral gigs. Spiral
Speaker 1: gigs I always think of like Arby's curly fries. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: it's because it's delicious bacteria. But I like my bacteria
Speaker 1: covered in melted cheese sauce. Uh yeah, that's because the
Speaker 1: bacteria do come in and generally in three general three shapes, right,
Speaker 1: you've got the spherical ones, you've got the rod shaped bacteria,
Speaker 1: and then you have the spiral the spiro keet bacteria,
Speaker 1: which always makes me think of The Simpsons because there's
Speaker 1: the part where uh, Lisa's teacher explains that she has
Speaker 1: lyme disease and then Ralph Wiggam draws a spiro keat
Speaker 1: for her and in her get well, card I drew
Speaker 1: you was spiro keat. You didn't see that season? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that was the one where Lisa develops a crush on
Speaker 1: the replacement teacher who comes in because he's he's very
Speaker 1: smooth talking and doesn't talk down to the students, and
Speaker 1: she just falls in love with him. Uh. We usually
Speaker 1: use the word bacteria rather than bacteria um because we
Speaker 1: tend to talk about a whole mess of them. It's
Speaker 1: very rare that you're going to talk about a single
Speaker 1: bacterium because steria rarely get lonely. No, they usually they
Speaker 1: usually got a group of friends together, and if they
Speaker 1: don't have a big group of friends together, they work
Speaker 1: really hard to change that. Yeah. So that's those Those
Speaker 1: are your general like simple foundational facts. About bacteria, and
Speaker 1: like Lauren was saying, there are tons of different kinds.
Speaker 1: Even within these three main classifications of shapes, there are
Speaker 1: tons of different kinds. Some of them are beneficial to us,
Speaker 1: some of them can make you very very ill, and
Speaker 1: some of them we just don't really react, like there's
Speaker 1: no interaction, and some are pretty neutral. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a you know, a D and D campaign. Really,
Speaker 1: you've got some, You've got some that are like lawful good,
Speaker 1: and then you get kaolic evil, and then true neutral.
Speaker 1: So those are your basic types. Uh. And then we
Speaker 1: got to get on over to the how how bacteria,
Speaker 1: like the unwanted kind, the stuff we don't want in
Speaker 1: our systems, how those can interact with us and make
Speaker 1: us not feel so great. And that's one of the
Speaker 1: primary reasons why we are interested as a human population,
Speaker 1: not the three of us in this room, in studying bacteria,
Speaker 1: because of aously, people getting sick is bad. We want
Speaker 1: that to happen less often. Uh, And instead it seems
Speaker 1: to be happening more often. And our primary means of
Speaker 1: fighting bacteria tends to be using the use of antibiotics.
Speaker 1: But we're kind of in an arms race, aren't we. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great way of putting it is. It's that
Speaker 1: we come up with an antibiotic, and then bacteria can
Speaker 1: sometimes find a means to resist that antibiotic, thus making
Speaker 1: it less effective. Any population of bacteria that still remain
Speaker 1: after an antibiotic has been moved through a system are
Speaker 1: more capable of resisting it in the future, thus creating
Speaker 1: kind of super bacteria. Yeah, it's evolution on the micro scale.
Speaker 1: And in this way, bacteria are kind of like the borg.
Speaker 1: I mean, what happens when you use a weapon on
Speaker 1: the borg? They immediately recognize that attack. Once if the
Speaker 1: attack is successful, they recognize it, they adjust their shields
Speaker 1: so that now it absorbs it. That's why you always
Speaker 1: have to vary the frequency, right, except in antibiotics, we
Speaker 1: can't really vary the frequency. And we talked a lot
Speaker 1: about this, well, not about borgs, but about this general
Speaker 1: topic in our episode the antibiotic Dilemma, which came out
Speaker 1: in March. But right, you know, antibiotics, the point of
Speaker 1: them is to slow down the growth of bacteria, you know,
Speaker 1: either kill them or slow them down to the point
Speaker 1: that your immune system can successfully fight off an infection.
Speaker 1: On its own. And the problem here is is that
Speaker 1: bacteria again have a lot of friends hanging out with them.
Speaker 1: They multiply so fast and so densely that colonies can
Speaker 1: evolve to be resistant really really quickly. They divide by fission,
Speaker 1: and they can do that within twelve hours, so within
Speaker 1: the twenty four hour period the population can increase significantly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like you guys were saying, it's hard for antibiotics
Speaker 1: to keep up with them because the mechanisms through which
Speaker 1: antibiotics kill bacteria tend to be really easily foiled by evolution.
Speaker 1: For example, lots of antibiotics kill by basically just stabbing
Speaker 1: bacteria in their outer cell walls, uh, kind of sort
Speaker 1: of just making them rupture all of their cell guts
Speaker 1: spill out dead bacteria. But you know, critters with stronger
Speaker 1: cell walls will survive and multiply, and future generations will
Speaker 1: be less likely to be harmed by stabbing. So this
Speaker 1: is particularly an issue because we have become so dependent
Speaker 1: on antibiotics to solve bacterial disease problems, like we use
Speaker 1: them as blanket measures, and even healthy animals that we
Speaker 1: wind up eating we prescribe them for sometimes non relevant
Speaker 1: diseases or in cases that won't really significantly help the patient.
Speaker 1: We use them as blanket measures in like our hand
Speaker 1: soaps and dish soaps, instead of just promoting say, food
Speaker 1: handling and regular old handwashing, which are usually just as effective.
Speaker 1: And this would be I mean, this gets exacerbated if
Speaker 1: there's a misdiagnosis. Obviously, if you were prescribed antibiotics for
Speaker 1: something that ended up being a viral infection, it's not
Speaker 1: going to help you at all. Viral infections are different
Speaker 1: from bacterial infections. Yeah, so this is like if in
Speaker 1: a universe populated by borg we used our best weapon
Speaker 1: against the borg too, I don't know, clean the outside
Speaker 1: of our starships and then yeah, oh accidentally went past
Speaker 1: a board foot. Now they know how to stop it.
Speaker 1: That would that would be foolish of us. But yet
Speaker 1: that's maybe that was a horrible analogy. I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what we do occasionally with you know.
Speaker 1: It's it's not that people are uh, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of doing a blanket carpet bombing with antibiotics. It's just
Speaker 1: that that it has been such an effective tool and
Speaker 1: has saved so many lives that the the desire to
Speaker 1: go to that early is very strong, oh Sharon. And
Speaker 1: before we realized that that these antibiotic resistant strains were
Speaker 1: starting to develop, it seemed like a really great plan.
Speaker 1: And but then all of a sudden we wound up
Speaker 1: with stuff like um m R s A, which I
Speaker 1: could never pronounce the full name of. I'm not even
Speaker 1: gonna try. The cyllin resistant staff willocaucus arius. Yeah, go Joe, right,
Speaker 1: that sounds good to me. Methicillin resistant staff lacaucus arius.
Speaker 1: Well there we go, now, you know, and knowing's half
Speaker 1: the battle. The other half is red lacing. The other
Speaker 1: way you could say is that it's staff. It's a
Speaker 1: staff infection that has become resistant to the antibiotic methyicillin. Yes,
Speaker 1: because normally staff infections are just skin infections, but in hospitals,
Speaker 1: m R. S A can cause deadly blood and surgical
Speaker 1: infections and pneumonia, nasty stuff like that. It's this is
Speaker 1: also where we got stuff like gnarrhea that never goes away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bad times. So okay, we still need to use antibiotics
Speaker 1: in some situations. They still save lots and lots of
Speaker 1: lives unless we can find some other way of fighting bacteria,
Speaker 1: and that leads us into a discussion about how bacteria
Speaker 1: act on moss, because there's a there's a question that
Speaker 1: you have to ask yourself when you start looking at
Speaker 1: bacterial behavior, which is, how can something this this very simple,
Speaker 1: single celled organism, how does it know quote unquote when
Speaker 1: to unleash the kraken of bacterial infection upon a host? Right,
Speaker 1: Because even even bacteria that can typically be very dangerous
Speaker 1: to us are not always in their dangerous state. There
Speaker 1: there's a few factors that go into whether or not
Speaker 1: bacteria make you sick, and that includes, um, whether or
Speaker 1: not they're pathogenic, which is whether or not they're in
Speaker 1: like attack mode, and how virulent they are, which is, um,
Speaker 1: how little stabby, Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And are they angry? How hungry are they? And sometimes
Speaker 1: it's just that they have to wait until the population
Speaker 1: is a certain size and then that's when they unleashed
Speaker 1: the dogs of war or the cracker however, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to I'm gonna just keep saying unleashed stuff. It's
Speaker 1: like you're you're you're playing StarCraft and you're trying to
Speaker 1: save up for a zerk swarm right right, and you
Speaker 1: just you know there's going to be one. You just
Speaker 1: you're not sure when. And you know it's not gonna
Speaker 1: be something like You're not gonna have a case where
Speaker 1: it's just one or two things coming at you. It's
Speaker 1: just gonna be a mass of them. I I apologize
Speaker 1: if I said that wrong. I've never actually played star Craft.
Speaker 1: I just know that's a thing. You just lost cred
Speaker 1: with pg O. You're like way ahead, all right, so
Speaker 1: so so yeah, So it turns out that bacteria, despite
Speaker 1: not having a brain or even a cell nucleus, communicate
Speaker 1: with each other, and it's in a really interesting way.
Speaker 1: The way this was sort of observed early on was
Speaker 1: through um an experiment in which some researchers were using
Speaker 1: bacteria called Vibrio fisher i, which is a type of
Speaker 1: bacteria that is luminescent. When when there are a certain
Speaker 1: number of the bacteria, then they all uh in sync
Speaker 1: luminesce they glow. Yeah, so they actually there was a
Speaker 1: Ted talk we watched in which the presenter showed a
Speaker 1: picture of a flask of this stuff and it's just
Speaker 1: glowing green. It looks like, you know, the stuff you
Speaker 1: would see in a glow stick, but in this case
Speaker 1: it was just the bacteria that had reached a certain
Speaker 1: population density. And that's the key. They call it quorum sensing.
Speaker 1: And by that what they mean is the bacteria are
Speaker 1: able to produce the sort of molecular um uh signals,
Speaker 1: let's say, chemicals that that are essentially saying hey, I'm
Speaker 1: here and uh. They're called auto inducers, and they also
Speaker 1: have sensors. This this essentially a receptor that's on the
Speaker 1: bacterial cell wall. So their message molecules and in ways
Speaker 1: of detecting right. And so what will happen is if
Speaker 1: the bacterium is all by, it's lonesome, it sends these
Speaker 1: autoinducers out which just float away and nothing gets picked up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not targeted. It's not like I am bacteria or
Speaker 1: Bacterium Laura, and I am aiming at Bacterium Jonathan to
Speaker 1: send a message. It's just like a Hey. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like imagine that you are stranded on a deserted
Speaker 1: island and you have your your collection of bottles and
Speaker 1: collection of parchment, and you're writing down messages and throwing
Speaker 1: them into the ocean, hoping someone picks them up. Same
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Or it could be that you are
Speaker 1: in a post zombie outbreak safe haven with a radio
Speaker 1: transmitter and you're transmitting your location in your coordinates and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we should we humans should band together, right, But you're
Speaker 1: doing it, you know, on a frequency that you've picked
Speaker 1: at random that people may or may not be listening to.
Speaker 1: So as you get more of the bacteria cells around
Speaker 1: the there grows, there's the density that grows of these
Speaker 1: auto inducer these molecules that are sent out because all
Speaker 1: of them are are admitting them, right, So you're sending
Speaker 1: out more and more because the population is growing. When
Speaker 1: you reach a certain threshold, then the bacterial cells will
Speaker 1: be able to detect the presence of those auto inducers,
Speaker 1: and that is the message that to say, hey, express
Speaker 1: this gene that does something. In the case of the
Speaker 1: Fibrio fisheri bacteria, it was to luminess to to glow.
Speaker 1: Another way that this gene can be expressed, though, is
Speaker 1: in the production of biofilms, which is something I'm gonna
Speaker 1: talk about in a minute, right. Yeah, there's a few
Speaker 1: different auto inducer signals that can happen. The on and
Speaker 1: off switch of of pathogenesis um kind of scale of
Speaker 1: virulence um, the formation of protective spores around individual bacterium
Speaker 1: which which tell the bacterium, hey, time to bunker down
Speaker 1: for a minute and hold on uh. And the also
Speaker 1: the creation of certain substances stuff like that. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's kind of neat because this is not limited just
Speaker 1: to intra species communication. In other words, you could have
Speaker 1: a population of bacteria that can all communicate with one another.
Speaker 1: The the auto inducers that they are emitting our only
Speaker 1: keyed to members of that bacteria. In other words, you
Speaker 1: can think of it like a key that will only
Speaker 1: fit a specific lock. But they can also emit other
Speaker 1: auto inducers that are more universal that all bacteria can accept.
Speaker 1: The microbes are uniting against us, they kind of are.
Speaker 1: Although researchers suspect that this thro out of a competition
Speaker 1: for resources between different species. There's one particular auto inducer
Speaker 1: called AI too, which a whole lot of species are
Speaker 1: keyed into. And and it seems like like quorum sensing
Speaker 1: espionage goes on between species to like try to confuse
Speaker 1: different different other bugs. You might have one population of
Speaker 1: bacteria accepting these saying all right, now we know who
Speaker 1: else is out there, but we're not gonna say anything.
Speaker 1: We're we're only going to communicate using our own specific language,
Speaker 1: and that way we can prepare and unleash the dogs
Speaker 1: of war one and we can trick them into calming
Speaker 1: down for a while. Really, So there's also microbial disinformation
Speaker 1: sort of. It's really more of a decision about whether
Speaker 1: to communicate or not, right, the idea being like do
Speaker 1: you reveal that you are there, or do you keep
Speaker 1: its secrets so that you can build up your resources
Speaker 1: to a point where you then switch it on and attack. Um,
Speaker 1: keep in mind, like there are a lot of bacteria
Speaker 1: that are very much protective of a host, and then
Speaker 1: there are other bacteria that can be very harmful. So
Speaker 1: it behooves the harmful bacteria to kind of keep things
Speaker 1: on the quiet before going you know, ballistic, right, to
Speaker 1: have enough of a population to really do what it's
Speaker 1: intending to do before the host's immune system can figure
Speaker 1: it out. Right, right, So, uh yeah, we've already kind
Speaker 1: of talked about some of these different genetic expressions. There
Speaker 1: are also cases where the population density actually informs the
Speaker 1: bacteria to turn off expression. One of these is in
Speaker 1: cholera cholera, if the population gets too dense, then essentially
Speaker 1: the message goes out to hey, guys, let's calm it
Speaker 1: down a little bit. We're going to kill this guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we want to be able to uh, to spread
Speaker 1: this as much as possible. That's our purpose. But if
Speaker 1: we go crazy, then the host may die as a result,
Speaker 1: or when in the case of cholera, the victim may
Speaker 1: end up experience experience seeing severe diarrhea, which then pretty
Speaker 1: much pushes out tons of the bacteria as a result.
Speaker 1: So it all depends upon the actual bacteria and what
Speaker 1: its quote unquote goals are, like what what its survival
Speaker 1: strategy is, and that determines whether or not it's turning
Speaker 1: on a gene once it hits a certain density or
Speaker 1: turning off a gene once it hits a certain density. Right,
Speaker 1: So there are lots of different research teams studying quorum
Speaker 1: sensing and looking for ways to either disrupt it or
Speaker 1: artificially stimulate it. So they're looking into the chemicals and
Speaker 1: the enzymes that are used in the process, plus the
Speaker 1: mechanisms that the bacteria have for creating and detecting these signals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess that leads us to the article that
Speaker 1: made us want to talk about this today. It was
Speaker 1: an interesting article in Scientific American from August about what
Speaker 1: what they called molecular tweeting in the study of bacterial communication.
Speaker 1: Now this doesn't mean bacteria literally using Twitter are not characters. No,
Speaker 1: But I wonder I can't come up with a good
Speaker 1: joke there. I do wonder. I do wonder if they
Speaker 1: occasionally attempt to tweet out a pizza slice and hopes
Speaker 1: that Dominoes will deliver to them. Yeah, you haven't seen
Speaker 1: those commercials. Yeah, that's a new thing where you can
Speaker 1: tweet out a emoji of a pizza slice and you
Speaker 1: order yourself a pizza. But what if it's not the
Speaker 1: kind of pizza you want? I think you. I think
Speaker 1: you set up a profile to say what type of
Speaker 1: pizza you want? Whenever you send that it's not gluten free. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is a new bit of research about bacterial communications.
Speaker 1: So it was a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon
Speaker 1: University led by the engineering professor du Marculiske, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to use Twitter as a model to sort of
Speaker 1: help us visualize or understand different hypes of bacterial communication,
Speaker 1: how bacteria communicate with each other to form antibiotic resistant
Speaker 1: superstructures called biofilms. Yeah, this is interesting to me because
Speaker 1: it's when you might ask why Twitter. But if you've
Speaker 1: ever if you ever noticed something, when something begins to
Speaker 1: trend on Twitter, it's hit a certain density, like a
Speaker 1: pop culture density within Twitter itself, And that's kind of
Speaker 1: what they were comparing the behavior of bacteria too. That
Speaker 1: if you have enough people sending out this one little message,
Speaker 1: whether it's a hashtag or whatever, and then it catches on,
Speaker 1: that could be similar to the way a bacterial UH
Speaker 1: community sends out these messages to the point where it
Speaker 1: hits that population density. Yeah, it's a really clever metaphor.
Speaker 1: And also it is completely scientifically factual that people on
Speaker 1: Twitter will form UH slimy yet protective surfaces against which
Speaker 1: the greater population is protective. I've been there, I've seen it.
Speaker 1: We should talk about what these surfaces are. What are
Speaker 1: you're actually referring to. So large numbers of bacteria can
Speaker 1: communicate with one another to work together to form biofilm
Speaker 1: that protects them from threats. So a bacterium floating along
Speaker 1: individually in water is something we would refer to as
Speaker 1: plank tonic. That's plank tonic bacteria. You can think of
Speaker 1: it kind of like plankton in the ocean, is little
Speaker 1: bits floating along by themselves. They're free swimming. But biofilms
Speaker 1: are structures that are created when microorganisms like bacteria fix
Speaker 1: themselves down to a surface and they form dense conglomerations.
Speaker 1: So instead of using resources to build structures like flagella
Speaker 1: that help them swim along, they divert those resources and
Speaker 1: instead use them to build extracellular matrix, which is a
Speaker 1: kind of slime or polymer film that forms a protective
Speaker 1: structure around the bacteria. And these large back sterial films
Speaker 1: might be thought of as a kind of multicellular organism
Speaker 1: made out of former single celled organisms. Yeah, it's pretty gross. Especially, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gross because they can form inside your body. Bacterial
Speaker 1: films can be really bad first because they have tougher
Speaker 1: defenses and they can linger inside the body for a
Speaker 1: long time and cause chronic infections. They're much more resistant
Speaker 1: to your to your immune system, and to antibiotics because
Speaker 1: of these protective structures and matrices that they form. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like going back to Star Trek, going
Speaker 1: like like divertal power to the forward shields and then
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, it's a community of a power grid
Speaker 1: adding to a single point of of shielding. Right, But
Speaker 1: how do brainless, single cell little critters decide to do this, Like,
Speaker 1: how do they figure out when they can form a
Speaker 1: biofilm instead of and how that will help? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the CMU researchers that we're referred to in this Scientific
Speaker 1: American article started by observing bacteria in the process of
Speaker 1: coming together to form biofilms. So they got some bacteria,
Speaker 1: set them to work, and observed what they did. And
Speaker 1: they were trying to observe the specific conditions under which
Speaker 1: biofilm growth takes place. And then they use that information
Speaker 1: to make some software that could simulate the behavior of
Speaker 1: bacteria undergoing biofilm growth. And this is the real outcome
Speaker 1: of this study is the idea is the idea that
Speaker 1: we can create simulations of how bacteria communicate with one
Speaker 1: another under these circumstances, which can help us learn how
Speaker 1: to defeat them once and for all. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: even if you could just uh, because we've talked about
Speaker 1: or or rather, scientists have talked about either replacing or
Speaker 1: or restricting communication among bacteria as a means to keep
Speaker 1: them from being able to form these defensive measures or
Speaker 1: to uh delay virulence or or not anys genesis. That
Speaker 1: the idea that if we can mess up their communication lines,
Speaker 1: then they'll never know that they're at the stage where
Speaker 1: they could unleash the krackn Right, So what does all
Speaker 1: this have to do with Twitter? We mentioned Twitter Twitter
Speaker 1: a minute ago. Well, it was pretty interesting that Twitter
Speaker 1: user behavior proved to be a really interesting metaphor for
Speaker 1: three different behavior models that they used in their simulations
Speaker 1: of bacteria. So there's let's call them type one through three.
Speaker 1: Type one bacteria tweets and retweets, and what it tweets
Speaker 1: and retweets are signaling molecules, those things you talked about
Speaker 1: in coorum sensing earlier. So it sends out messages to
Speaker 1: build biofilm, and it relays the messages to build biofilm
Speaker 1: that it receives Type two bacteria tweets but doesn't retweet.
Speaker 1: So it sends out messages, It sends out the signaling molecules,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't retweet the messages it receives and then
Speaker 1: type three. This is interesting is lurker bacteria. These are
Speaker 1: these are the ones that don't post. They don't repost,
Speaker 1: they just absorb. Yeah, so they sit there and they
Speaker 1: don't send a relay messages, but instead just create their
Speaker 1: own materials to grow biofilm. And according to the Scientific
Speaker 1: American article, Markliskew is going to be presenting research on
Speaker 1: this subject at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Bioinformatics,
Speaker 1: Computational Biology and Health Informatics, which is going to be
Speaker 1: right here in Atlanta starting on September nine, tomorrow, exactly
Speaker 1: taking place between the time that we record in this
Speaker 1: episode goes live. So if he says something world shattering
Speaker 1: and you all already know about it by the time
Speaker 1: you hear this, whoops. But well, well, if if it's
Speaker 1: earth shattering, we will also address it in a future
Speaker 1: episode where we're like, hey, here's some stuff that happened
Speaker 1: since we recorded. Yeah, this is all really interesting to me,
Speaker 1: and uh, a lot of information that I was not
Speaker 1: aware of before we started doing the research. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I think is interesting about this
Speaker 1: is it's yet another example of people trying to create
Speaker 1: computer simulations to solve problems. This is something that comes
Speaker 1: up a lot on this show, I think, because and
Speaker 1: it's interesting because simulations like these are going to be
Speaker 1: incredibly helpful, but by themselves, they will never solve a problem.
Speaker 1: They're just tools that help us work out what we
Speaker 1: need to test, to figure out how to fight these
Speaker 1: things right, and how to best use our resources. Because
Speaker 1: if you just dig in there and you go like, okay, bacteria,
Speaker 1: let's try sending this chemical at you, then that's that's
Speaker 1: a less good way of going about your spending your
Speaker 1: research time and money. Yeah, and I think it's sort
Speaker 1: of part of a larger narrative that it's all about
Speaker 1: modeling the real world and simulation, Like how how close
Speaker 1: to the complex behaviors of real world phenomena can we
Speaker 1: get with computer programs. Obviously, the closer we can get,
Speaker 1: the more we can test in the virtual space rather
Speaker 1: than testing in the physical space before we know what
Speaker 1: the answer is. But there's always going to be that
Speaker 1: gap between simulation and reality. Yeah. And and also we
Speaker 1: should mention that even if we really crack the code
Speaker 1: on this and it becomes a means for us to
Speaker 1: combat bacterial infections in a new way. There's nothing to
Speaker 1: say that this is the end of disease or anything bacterial,
Speaker 1: but even bacterial vectors. It's not the end of disease.
Speaker 1: Um that's something that is important to remember. But it
Speaker 1: could certainly give us an advantage in the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: But there's nothing saying that further down the line there
Speaker 1: won't be another um mutation or advantage that makes this
Speaker 1: less effective or as dr and Malcolm would say, finds
Speaker 1: a way. Yeah. Well that's really the bottom line in
Speaker 1: the story of evolution, in't it, Because we're fighting against
Speaker 1: evolution and that's a battle you can't in the long
Speaker 1: term win. Yeah. You could, actually you could completely eradicate
Speaker 1: a species, or you could I mean, I guess you
Speaker 1: could impose limitation so harsh that they come down to
Speaker 1: the laws of physics and no adaptation. But I mean, like,
Speaker 1: you can't have an organism that adapts to five thousand
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. But in most of those cases it requires
Speaker 1: action so extreme that we would be uh negatively impacting
Speaker 1: ourselves in the process. Yeah, and either way, you can
Speaker 1: never discount the idea that some nice old man who's
Speaker 1: very fond of wearing cuban shirts and carrying a cane
Speaker 1: is going to come along and purpose we recreate murderous creatures. Well,
Speaker 1: we just rewrote Jurassic Park, so wait, hold on, now,
Speaker 1: the story is that the friendly old billionaire creates. Mr Say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like everyone in the world has the chance to
Speaker 1: enjoy this. Mr Say, I'm ready. I'm ready to call
Speaker 1: it right now that amusement park is gonna suck. Well, oh,
Speaker 1: they just built the bolowing lick this surface. Well, with
Speaker 1: that in mind, I will invite all of you to
Speaker 1: infect us with your ideas for future episodes. If you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for topics that we should cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of Forward Thinking, whether it's the podcast or
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