Bacteria can Chill Out too!

I'm excited, I just found a new use of friendly bacteria I didn't know about!

Pseudomonas syringae is a pretty nasty plant pathogen. In fact, a lot of my reading for my project involves inhibiting or otherwise deterring it from infecting plants. But even a common disease causer like this can have its uses!

Because bacteria are so tiny, they can interact with things much smaller than we can. For example; water! Clouds are full of bacteria (see this blog post for more details) condensing water vapour together, but that's not all they can do. P. syringae can freeze water! Only a few degrees above normal freezing point, but a few degrees can make a huge difference (just look at the climate change stats!). This cool paper shows how they do it; they use proteins to move the water into structured arrangements which encourages freezing.

Why does this make them 'friendly' though? Well, they're used extensively in making artificial snow slopes! I had no idea about this, it's pretty awesome.

It's not just Pseudomonas that can make snowmen!

On the less friendly side of things, it also is bad news for plants; not only does P. syringae cause disease but it increases the likelihood of frost damage too. Which just goes to show; while bacteria may cause adverse affects in certain conditions, in others they can be really handy!

E. coli: the 'E' isn't for 'Evil'

It actually stands for 'escherichia' (which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, hence always just being called E coli).

Yesterday I was reading something about superbugs, and it listed E coli as one of the deadly ones. Everyone's always on the lookout for E coli contamination in food, restaurants, bathrooms etc. But is it really as scary as it's portrayed in the media?

Some strains are, definitely. K2 causes meningitis in newborn babies, O104H4 causes pretty nasty kidney damage (an outbreak in 2011 killed 52 people across the world) and scarily-named 'Entero-haemorrhagic E coli' strains like O157 cause bloody diarrhoea. Obviously being infected by any of these are on nobody's to-do-list, but just as the majority of bacteria as a whole don't cause disease, there are a huge range of E coli strains that aren't a threat at all. In fact, pretty much everyone has E coli as part of their normal community of gut bacteria! Animals included. That's partly why it's always looked for in restaurants and stuff; if it's in the intestines, then it'll be in what exits the intestines... so when they say 'we found E coli in 4/5 restaurants' they're basically saying there's faeces all over the place, so you should probably eat somewhere else until they start washing their hands! E coli  is therefore the poster boy for faecal contamination, but it's often more of a sign of contamination rather than the worst bacteria in there. It's just that it's much easier to  grow in the lab to detect, and that nowadays when there's so much genetic screening it's again easy to look for as we've got the whole genome sequenced. Often, food poisoning bacteria like Campylobacter jejuni are much more picky about what they want to grow on in the lab so it's quicker, cheaper and easier to just look for the E coli.

This is where E coli starts to redeem itself though; because it's so happy in lab conditions, it's really easy to work with! Everybody should love E coli. Not only is it easy to grow, it's pretty easy to insert genes into via various methods so we can customise it to be useful for all sorts of applications. One of the first examples of this, and one of my favourite examples of Friendly Bacteria, is the E coli that have been modified to produce human insulin. They first did this back in the seventies, and insulin is still made in this way to this day! Yeast is used sometimes too. Before that, they had to cut it out of corpses, or from pigs (which needed lots of accompanying medication).

I couldn't list all the ways E coli is used; a quick search for it on Google Scholar gives more than two and a half million different research papers using it! It's fair to say that without E coli we'd all be a lot worse off.

So should we fear E coli? No! It's our friend! (Apart from the baby-meningitis/bloody diarrhoea ones, feel free to fear them as much as you like)

Chilling on the beach; Student life Aber style

I went down to the beach yesterday evening, had fish and chips and just sat there with friends until after sunset. For me, this sums up all the best parts of being at University here in Aberystwyth; good friends, beautiful scenery, and a hugely relaxed yet fun atmosphere! Here's a bunch of photos I took:

The last one's looking out the window through some scaffolding that's up at the moment, but it was too good a view to not capture!

Vlogging; Scientists Are People Too

Weekly Vlog #2! I thought I'd combine this week's vlog with today's blog post to just say why I'm doing it and things like that.

So why am I doing a vlog? I'm ridiculously, painfully shy when talking to anyone. The thought of being the centre of anyone's attention fills me with dread! So why talk about my everyday life and put it out there for the world to see?

Firstly, precisely because it's really scary to me. I both want and need to be better at communicating, not only for things like conferences or my Viva but for general life too. I can barely bring myself to answer the phone, and things like social events or whatever cause me to retreat behind my walls and clam up like... well, a clam. This isn't good, and really holds me back socially which has knock-on affects throughout my life.

Secondly, I want to show that scientists (I know I'm just a PhD student but I'm calling myself one anyway) are people too! Everyone thinks of them as these scary figures in labcoats and rubber gloves but really it's just another job; scientists have fun, go to the pub, go on days out, just like any other person. I want to try and get that message across, and make science seem more accessible and enjoyable; really, anyone can participate in science in one way or another, and everyone can enjoy it!

So that's why I'm doing it. Feel free to tell me how I'm doing, good or bad!

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!