Handy Bacteria

No, not bacteria that can put up your shelves or fix the sink, or even ones that are useful to us... I'm talking hand bacteria! On your hands!

I mentioned before how pretty much everything is harbouring all sorts of bacteria. That definitely includes our hands! Skin is covered with salts and oils and stuff like that that bacteria find super tasty, and that's just average skin! We constantly touch things with our hands, getting tiny but significant amounts of all sorts of stuff (including more bacteria) on them. Now, don't be scared by the whole 'completely coated head to toe in bacteria' thing because as I've said before the overwhelming majority of them won't hurt us! But depending on what you're sticking your hands on, you might pick up something grisly like salmonella or whatever. That's not just touching chicken, though; if Edgar touches a contaminated chicken fillet, then touches the taps or door handle, there'll be salmonella on there, which can get on your hands even if you don't go anywhere near the chicken! Also, never ever wash raw chicken unless you like the idea of spraying tiny droplets of food poisoning onto every surface of your kitchen...

Anyway this isn't a post about food safety, it's about the hand bugs! Recently some researchers found that by comparing the bacteria on your hands to the ones on your belongings, like your phone or keyboard, they can actually get a pretty decent picture of who owns which thing! They'd like to use it for forensic stuff but that's a long way away if it ever happens at all.

Hooray! You thought I was going to be talking about food poisoning and telling you to wash your hands, but no! I pulled it back to the friendly bacteria again, this time crime-solving bacteria! Is there anything they can't do?!

We just watched Bone Tomohawk, it was great but the amount of wound infections and stuff they were constantly risking seemed crazy! We really take for granted how much we know about not getting gangrene that folks back then had no idea about... I guess we take 'not getting killed with an axe' for granted too but I'm here for the microbes not the axe murders!

Good film though, check it out!

They Came From Above!

Bacteria are everywhere. In your mouth, in your bed, at the bottom of the sea, underground, anywhere you can name that isn't really hot, really acidic or otherwise too hostile for life. But how did they get there? Some animals are found all over the place but they have stuff like wings and legs and Double Decker buses, bacteria don't have any of that!

On a small scale, they can kind of swim along with big floppy oars/propellers called flagellae, but I'm thinking bigger than that. Of course in the sea they can just float around on the current hoping they don't get eaten by whales, but on land? How did they get to Australia? Or Hawaii?

The key to this is partly their numbers. Being microscopic is less of a problem when there's billions of you, so while individual cells won't make the trip up a mountain or even across the floor the colony as a whole might spread there just by multiplying. Plus, due to their impressive rate of reproduction, even single cells getting to a new place can lead to it being colonised. Bacteria on migrating birds for example can be transferred to new lands. But one of my favourite routes of global bacterial transmission is via the clouds!

Clouds are full of bacteria. In fact, it's been shown that above about four degrees Celsius dust particles can't gather water vapour to form cloud particles, and bacteria are much more likely culprits. Just like marine bacteria float on ocean currents, airborne cloud bacteria can be carried all over the world! 

I used to work in a lab looking for thermophilic bacteria in soil samples from the UK. These bugs were needing temperatures of sixty to seventy degrees, so why were they in cold British soil? There's a weather phenomenon in Britain and Europe where everything gets covered in sand blown up from the Sahara desert, and the same winds can carry thermophiles to distant lands! I was working with Geobacillus, which can hibernate in spores for a huge amount of time, so they just kept getting added to the soil by the wind and rain. They were just sitting there for me to find!

Don't worry too much though: any bacteria in the rain are in too small numbers to cause you any harm. After all, most bacteria are friendly!

Friendly Bacteria's weekly Vlog #1 (April 2016)

I'm starting up a weekly vlog! Check it out and let me know what you think!

Friendly fungi: trip to the Penderyn distillery (and brewery)

I'm late posting this (and it'll be short) as I've been out today: we took my dad to a whisky distillery as another birthday treat! They had a brewery on site so the microbiologist in me was excited!

Breweries use yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) to create the alcohol. They do this by feeding them a sugar source, in this case barley grist, and taking away all the oxygen. This makes the yeast stop using the oxygen for respiration so in order to still get energy it ferments the sugars to ethanol, which gives the drinks their alcohol levels. Ethanol does eventually kill the yeast if there's too much of it, which is why you can't get much higher than fifteen or so percent without distilling it!
We saw that process too, with the big fractionation columns, then got to try some of the end product (and even some of the raw 92% stuff!) Which was delicious!
It was a fantastic day, and for me was great to see some friendly microbes being put to good use! Thanks, Penderyn!

Taking care of your new pet bacteria

Bacteria have a lot in common with the bigger organisms we all know and love. They need energy, warmth, and all sorts of nutrients in order to grow and live happily. By the way, when talking about bacteria 'grow' normally means 'divide by mitosis to form two daughter bacteria' rather than getting bigger. The great thing about bacteria is, they have adapted to be able to use a huge range of sources of energy and nutrients! Some, like cyanobacteria, harness the power of the sun like plants do. Others live so far underwater that there is no light, so use heat and sulphur and things from deep-sea thermal vents like white-smokers. For food, there are bacteria that can eat pretty much anything; if anything says 'biodegradable', that's just another way of saying 'bacteria can eat me!'

So how do we accommodate these weird and wonderful needs in order to take the bacteria from where they've evolved to live to a much more convenient (for me) laboratory? To be honest for a lot of bacteria we still don't know the answer; only a small proportion are able to be 'cultured', or grown in the lab. We can still find out about the picky ones by sequencing their DNA though, don't worry!

The ones we can grow in the lab do need a bit of looking after. It's a bit like looking after a pet Rabbit! First, you find an enclosure for them; rabbits have hutches, bacteria get petri dishes. Next, they'll need some 'bedding'. Rabbits get hay, which they also like to eat, so in the same way we give the bacteria an agar gel containing nutrients. This gives them a place to grow, and also the food they need! There are a lot of different rabbits but they can mostly be kept fed with the same mix of rabbit food, and once again bacteria are the same. They need a source of carbon, like sugar, some nitrogen, like in ammonia (although some can use it straight from the air), phosphates, and salts. (Of course it's a bit more complicated than that but that's the quick version!) These are all in 'general media' like the well-named 'nutrient agar'. This can then be modified to cater for a particular bacteria or family of bacteria. Some bacteria need to be grown in agar containing blood! Other common things are things like yeast extract, iron or sulphur.

They even look similar! You see it too, right?

Now that they've been fed and housed, we need to work out where to put the rabbit/bacteria. If you put the rabbit hutch in deep shade all winter, you might have some poor frozen bunnies inside. If you put it in full sun over the summer months, they'll start to cook! Bacteria are very similar. Some are happy at room temperature, some need 37 degrees celsius (our body temperature... this is ideal for human pathogens, so I tend to avoid it in my experiments) and some 'thermophiles' like Geobacillus need temperatures around 60 to 80 degrees! I think the highest growth temperature recorded is around 118 degrees (which is crazy! They can survive being boiled!) in some extremophilic bacteria. And archaea too, which is another microbe kingdom like bacteria and fungi. This is pretty easy to control these days though, there are all manner of fancy incubators that can go up to any temperature your pet rabbit bacteria enjoy!

Some don't mind a bit of heat!

That's pretty much it, to be honest. Different bacteria need different things so it's impossible to describe everything in a short blog post but I did my best! Maybe someday soon we'll be seeing bacteria in a cage at the pet shop... There is a microbe zoo in Amsterdam so it's only a matter of time!

Sunday Videos #1: Humble Beginnings

So who am I then?

I've been doing this blog for a little while now, but haven't really gone into much detail about myself. So who am I? Why do I like friendly bacteria so much? And why am I doing this blog at all?

I'm a twenty three year old PhD student with a microbiology background, in the first year of my PhD. I'm working with a type of friendly bacteria called endophytes, which live in plants and can help them grow and resist disease in exchange for a safe, stable place to live. It's fascinating! It's a bit like the bacteria in your intestines, they don't hurt the plant at all and can even provide good things like hormones and nutrients! I've got a long way to go before I finish but I'm loving it so far so I'm sure it'll fly by.

So why do I like friendly bacteria? Since a young age I've been amazed by the power bacteria have. These tiny creatures so small you can't see them can have huge effects on people, and even the whole world. Just look at the old plagues! The black death killed a huge proportion of the population of the world, but the bacteria behind it (Yersinia pestis) is still much smaller than even one cell of a human. Obviously more than one cell of it was involved, but just as a billion harmless droplets of water can cause flooding and devastation, the huge number of bacteria cause illness and death on a huge scale.
This power the bacteria hold captured my imagination. What if we could use that potential for the benefit of mankind? To continue the water analogy, hydroelectric dams use the power of the water for good, and I wanted to do the same with bacteria. This was before probiotics were popular, and I didn't really know about common uses of microbes like brewing or antibiotic production, but I kept that interest alive as I went on in life, and ended up studying microbiology at degree level. I've done some work in an industrial lab looking at bio ethanol production for fuel, and now I'm here working on my plants!
I realise "using microorganisms to improve higher organisms" sounds very Resident Evil (and I must admit that did help keep my interest in it going) but it's very safe and there's no danger of zombies! Although if it did happen nobody would be worried because I'm in the middle of nowhere and there'd be nobody to bite!

That's who I am, and why I'm doing what I do, but why did I start this blog? I'm really keen to get more science widely known, especially about the 'good bugs' in the world. I feel like a lot of people aren't really told much about bacteria, and microbes in general, so tend to throw up barriers whenever they come up rather than finding out about them. All science affects everybody, so I think having an understanding of how things work would benefit absolutely everyone no matter what they do or where they live worldwide. I already tell my family and friends about awesome, interesting things I find out but I want to spread that around and tell the world!
Whether you're a scientist yourself, or a child in school, or work in retail, an office, in construction, wherever, I want to make awesome scientific developments available, accessible and understandable to everybody!