The Language of Microbes | Jamie Foster | TEDxUF

[Music] foreign [Applause] hello everybody right now as you sit there in the audience billions if not trillions of conversations are happening between you and the microbes that inhabit your body this cacophony of microbial conversations what we call the microbiome maybe you've been hearing that word a lot lately well that microbiome is essentially telling your body what to do at the molecular level it's telling your body how to respond to the food you're eating how to respond if you're feeling stressed these conversations can also impact your cognitive functions and in some cases your behavior so you can blame that bad test score on your microbiome so together this microbial orchestra that is interacting and influencing the function and development of our bodies is quite sophisticated and essential for health but how do we know what the microbiome is actually saying to us how do we know if a microbe is there promoting our health or sending a danger signal causing disease interpreting these conversations or the language of microbes is not always easy to do because sometimes the health promoting and the disease-causing microbes are using the same words or mechanisms to communicate with our bodies now the molecular language of microbes is extensive there's a vast vocabulary or lexicon of words that microbes use to communicate that can vary situation by situation you've heard the expression context is everything well it's also true for the microbes that inhabit our body sometimes a bacterial signal in one part of your body say the digestive system can promote your health but change the context of that signal and move it to say the heart or the bloodstream and it could potentially cause damage or or disease to the body in other words sometimes a microbial signal is a friendly hello like you had me at hello love at first sight but change the context of that signal and it could become a scary hello like say hello to my little friends here no thank you one example of The Duality of the microbial language is a bacteria molecule called lipopolysaccharide it's half lipid half sugar let's just call it LPS for short LPS coats the surface of many different types of microbes and it's often one of the first bacteria molecules your body sees when it starts a new interaction with the micro it's the microbes way of saying hello but it's a complicated hello for almost a hundred years we've known about LPS but we always thought of it as the molecule giving the scary hello we even call it an endotoxin I mean that sounds pretty bad we always thought of it as a module triggering alarm bells for the body activating or causing inflammation or maybe disease but now we're learning that LPS is context dependent it depends on what microbe is presenting that LPS and where it's going in the body now we're learning that some LPS molecules can actually mitigate and control inflammation and it's even being targeted as a potential therapeutic to help people with those conditions so sometimes that endotoxin LPS is a friendly hello and in some animals like the bobtail squid that I work on for my research their LPS actually can induce the normal healthy development of some of its tissues in fact animal models like the bobtail squid can serve as important platforms for us to begin to explore when a conversation steers towards health and when it steers towards disease to begin to understand what tips the balance between health and disease it's important to become fluent in the language of microbes under a wide range of environmental conditions for example say you wanted to learn a new language say you wanted to learn Japanese but you only practice words that would help you at a bar or a restaurant that might not prepare you for having a conversation in a different setting like the airport or the grocery store asking for a fuzzy navel at a bar is going to get you a very tasty drink but ask for a fuzzy navel in a grocery store that might get you moldy fruit so the same words in different contexts can have very different meanings but by putting microbes in these different environmental settings they can reveal to us different meanings of these words or how microbes adjust these conversations to respond to a change in the environment now one way to begin to explore the full range of these conversations is to put microbes in novel environments environments that they don't normally see or have ever seen before by putting microbes in novel environments they can reveal to us new words or genes that we've never seen before or how microbes are different meanings for words that we that they use to communicate one novel environment that I use for my research into the language of microbes is the space flight environment working and living in space is physiologically demanding whether you are an astronaut a plant being grown for food or the microbe living in the astronaut the plant or even the spacecraft space is a challenging place to live and work because there are a lot of hazards that one has to deal with causing stress for for life in the space environment one stress is radiation that emits from the Sun solar wind which is a stream of energy particles emanating from the Sun slams into the planet it warps our magnetic field which is there protecting all life on Earth now that solar radiation can generate beautiful displays of light if you've ever had the chance to see the polar lights but if you're an astronaut charged with exploring beyond the biosphere not having that protective magnetic field might be a hazard you have to deal with another Hazard that life has to deal with in the space environment is the reduction of gravity all living things on the planet whether you are a microbe or an elephant has evolved in the presence of gravity even squid and aquatic organisms get their cues and their orientation from Gravity it's one of the few environmental factors that has remained constant throughout the history of our planet but by removing gravity it's not only tough to work and live in the space environment especially if you're trying to eat a lovely space Taco that you just made but it's also physiologically stressful on both the animal part of you and the microbial part of you but by removing gravity and conducting research in the space environment like on the International Space Station we can begin to explore what gravity has been obscuring about how biology functions in particular how microbes adjust their communication strategies so to begin to explore this idea of how animals and microbes talk to each other in the space environment I've been working with my friend here the bobtail squid which we recently sent to space so why send a little cephalonaut into space why squid well this Squid's pretty unique in that it has the ability to glow in the dark with the help of a microbe called vibril fisherie the squid has a special organ called the light organ that houses this luminous bacteria and the bacteria along with its lipopolysaccharide giving that friendly you had me at hello colonizes that light organ and induces a developmental restructuring such that the squid has the power to manipulate and control the light made by the bacteria so the squid can use this bacteria-powered light organ kind of like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak where the squid can Shine the bacterial light downward into the water column and cast no shadow so the squid can hide from predators as it swims along the ocean but this simple partnership is also important because unlike our bodies that have thousands of different species of microbes interacting with it at any moment in time in this squid there's just one bacterial species caught living in that light organ making it a lot easier for us to tease apart the molecular dialogue that's happening between animal and micro so when we sent the squid to space we actually sent them all up without any microbes at all and we took half of the animals and we colonized them with their partner vibrio fischeri and took molecular snapshots over time to see how that conversation initiated and unfurled in the space environment but we also kept an eye on the animals that didn't receive their microbes to see what happens when you don't have the right microbe in space well one of the first things that happened is when the animals got to space they were all showing signs of stress they were turning on genes associated with heat stress and oxygen stress even though the temperature and the oxygen levels in their space habitat were nominal but where things got interesting was when in the animals that received their microbes after about 12 hours their stress levels decreased almost completely disappeared suggesting maybe the microbes are keeping the animals healthy in the space environment and in the animals that never received their microbes their stress levels stayed high and persisted over time so these results are telling us that the microbes might be helping to mitigate and regulate the stress response of the squid in the space environment so the lessons we're learning from space flight experiments like the one with the bobtail squid in space are important for a couple of different reasons first more and more people private citizens like you and I we're going to space over the next couple decade you might have a chance to go visit one of the many new commercial space destinations that are being built also astronauts are going back to the moon and they're going to stay there for days weeks maybe even months at a time and Beyond the Moon is Mars that hopefully humans will get to in the next couple of decades and on all these Adventures microbes will be coming with us and we're going to need them we're going to need them to keep us healthy we're going to need to put them to work to build materials nutrients and medicines for us in space because what happens if we are halfway to Mars and one microbe goes extinct in our microbiome is that going to be a problem well until we learn the language of microbes at the beginning middle and end of these conversations we don't fully know second the lessons we're learning aren't just to keep astronauts and space tourists alive and well the information we learn can be directly translated to help the people here on Earth we're now taking snapshots of microbiomes in a wide range of states of health and disease under many environmental conditions but what we don't fully know yet is is the microbiome causing all of these diseases or is it simply responding to some sort of change in the body or environment in other words is the pattern of microbial diversity that we see the source or symptom of these diseases and that represents an important Frontier into the research in in the human microbiome but what we do know is microbial diversity is our superpower that we need to stay healthy we have to maintain a healthy diverse community of microbes such that the Symphony of their words is in sync with our bodies helping us with our normal functions and allowing us to cope with changes in our environment like stress we are all coping with stress in our environment whether it is worrying about finals week or worrying about our features but our microbes are there for us we are not alone and if we listen carefully and learn to speak their language we can build tools and Therapeutics that can help us tip the balance towards microbial and human health thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,311

Keywords: English, Microbiology, Science, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:53846]

Id: bgewrjt1t50

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023