Building With Bacteria

But today we wanted to talk about bacteria, microbes and and ways that we have found two to get these these tiny, these microscopic organisms to do stuff that either they wouldn't normally do, or they would do it, but they would do it at a very slow rate, and to ramp it up so that we can actually make

use out of the microscopic world. Yeah, it's interesting the idea of trying to get microbes working for us instead of against us, since you know, we've all experienced plenty of setbacks in our lives due to what bacteria have to offer and arsenal, some some food poisoning in there or something. In fact, one of the major culprits of food poisoning E. Coli is going to pop up a lot in this podcast. It's hard to stop ecoali from

popping up. That room temperature hot dog is yeah, just boy, that that that potato salad that's been left out for a while. That's that's still good. The future of engineering

is what it is. In fact, there's some applications will be talking about where the reason why we're looking to bacteria in the first place is because we don't know of any way to scent the size the materials that the bacteria produced naturally, or if we do, it's like really inefficient, really inefficient, really expensive, very you know, time and energy consuming. So it just makes way more sense

to go with the bacteria. But there was at least one of the the articles that we read where specifically they said, we cannot synthesize this in the lab, and I think, well, well, we probably should say we can't synthesize it today. Maybe sometimes down the road we can, but it makes way more sense to pour the money into research and development with bacterial organisms that do produce this stuff and find ways of making them do that at a much larger scale than what they currently do.

And then we just we reap the benefit that way. Yeah, and in fact, that's one of the biggest challenges really is figuring out how to how to optimize these processes so that you get a usable amount of stuff, something that you can use in manufacturing, for instance, or producing drugs.

We've been doing that. I mean, we we use bacteria to produce insulin, so I mean it's it's one of those things where you know, insulin for people who have to do insulin injections, a lot of insulins generated through bacteria. So through bacteria that's been genetically tampered with, like what we reach in there and we we lift out part of a plasm it and replace it with a piece

of human DNA that creates insulin exactly. Yeah, essentially you gotta remember d N A. That's that's that's like instructions. It's almost like a program. You can think of it if you're thinking in terms of computers. You can think of it as an algorithm or set of instructions that tell uh A in this case, a a cellular bacterium cell, a cell. There are words that are coming from me a cell. This is where Lauren would jump in if

she were here. But you know, she's battling her own bacteria. Uh, it's where a cell would end up following these directions to you know, saying when this happens, do this. That's essentially, you know, like an if then kind of function, and uh, if we switch those instructions out, then that's what the

cell will do. That's drastically oversimplifying what's going on. But if you if you take a really high view of what we are trying to do, that's essentially the step you try and find the little elements of d n A that you can use to swap in and out for these various kinds of bacteria and get the results you need. And ecoli turns out to be one of the ones we use the most frequently. And you might wonder, you know, well, you know, I've heard about ecoli every time.

Everything I've heard about it is essentially that it's bad, you don't want it, and you're uncooked hamburger. It's why you need to ruin your hamburger before you eat it, right, Yeah, because you don't want to you know, by ruin it, I think Joe means that, yeah, cooking it until it's well done, yeah, as opposed to to medium rare um. Yeah, yeah, there are. There are restaurants in in Atlanta now where they won't do it medium rare. At least they won't.

They say on the menu they won't do it in the well A lot do and they just have a little disclaimer there. It's like, you know, but you might die, but it'll taste good and you'll be happy when you die. So we're gonna talk a lot about E Coli. That means that we I thought a quick history lesson on Eco I was an order and so in the late nineteenth century there was a German pediatrician who was looking

into why babies were dying. Uh, they were, they were had they had a symptom of diarrhea, and they were just they were dying, and he wanted to find out what it was that was causing the diarrhea. Are you talking abouts No? Oh, okay, I'm talking about Theodore. Oh I'm sorry. I thought we were going down then. simWISE, totally distract Theodore Escorridge. And if you wonder why it's called E Coli Escaridge, that's his last name. It's it's actually Escarrichia. Coli is the full name of E. Coli

and so it comes from this guy, Thomas es An Honor. Yeah. He well, he was he was trying to figure out how, you know, what, what was the mechanism that was causing these babies to become sick and how could he fight that? And so he was looking into it and he found what he thought was the causative agent, and he thought it was an organism that was causing this because he was he was following the germ theory of illness. Yeah, it was a a theory. Not everyone at that time

subscribe to it. So certainly not the people who jailed Dignate simil wise right, right, right exactly. I mean that's the thing is that you know, there were there were there were those who were pursuing this line of thought, and there were those who were denying it. He was pursuing it, and uh, he ended up discovering what he called Bacillus communists coli, which now we all call e coli. And uh, it was actually named that after his death,

and we call it a model organism. And the reason we call it that is because there's been so much study of ecoli that we know everything about it. We know the full genome of ecoli and also, uh, it's a great example of something that you can work with in a laboratory because laboratory conditions. You know, it can grow in a very wide range of conditions. But it does really really well in um in just room temperature,

so you can grow it very quickly. It has a very rapid growth rate, so it has very simple nutritional requirements. We know all the genetics about it, so and you mean literally all the genetics. So it's kind of at this point like open source BioWare right, exactly. Yeah, you can look at this as saying this is this is the slate we can build on. It's not quite a blank slate because we actually do have to remove stuff and then replace it with other stuff in order to

make the ecolie do what we wanted to do. But it means that because we have such a deep understanding of this particular organism, it's perfect for some genetic modifications so that we can make it do other things. The lenox of germs, it kind of is. Yeah, and it's a little penguin shaped bacteria. It's not quite penguin shape exactly shaped like a room temperature hot dog. Yep. Good times.

So so anyway, they're using eco life for lots of different things, including producing various kinds of chemicals for both drugs and for manufacturing projects. Yeah, so we mentioned that it may it can make ethanol, which is the alcohol that makes your wine awesome or your beer awesome. Or it can make it can help make sorry with insulin, right for drugs. What what else can it do? What else can it make? Well, let's see it can make well, it can make isoprene is supreme. Yeah, that's uh, that's

like jet airliner fuel, isn't it. It's also like the stuff that can go into rubber. Yeah, so your tires and your tires. Yeah, so I mean you can get isoprene in different ways, right, you can. You can do it essentially the way we get isoprene get lots of stuff. You can get it from fossil fuels especially. Yeah, you go to oil. You you sit there and say, well, this has got another byproduct we can get out of oil petroleum based stuff. But you know that's not necessarily

environmentally friendly. And it's true that you can also genetically engineer e coolie to produce this stuff. In fact, it produce a little bit on its own. So really, what we're genetically engineering it to do is produce it, Yeah, exactly much larger amounts for it to be efficient because, uh, you know, you could start to harvest it from ecoli, but if it's just tiny little amounts, it would take forever for you to have enough for it to be useful.

It wouldn't be a good use of your time and resources. But by genetically modifying the ecoli, you can dramatically increase the output and thus make it something that's a viable option. So it's making this carbon compound is supreme. What it is a carbon compound, right, hydrocarbon, hydrocarbon, All those like the plastics and all the things we make from oil tend to be that. Right, So what's the investment in this?

Do you do? You just need to feed the bacteria. Basically, you just give them some sugar based on corn or sugarcane or something like. It essentially is that you you feed them certain chemicals and then they will produce the isoprene and uh, just in their regular process of of of life. You know, it's just all it's all life process for them. So it does mean altering the cells a little bit so that they will do this on

a scale that makes it useful. But yeah, they're essentially eating and pooping is what they're doing, right, And it's micro organism level, so it's not really eating and pooping. That's again kind of just putting it analogous to a macro organism. But but for the purposes of this conversation, sure they they eat stuff that is not as useful to us and crap out stuff that's really useful to us.

So that could give us a very environmentally friendly way of producing isoprene on a on a level that's important enough for the manufacturing processes right now, you know, they're they're mostly in the research and development phase of that kind of work. But we've also seen bacteria producing other stuff. You you pointed me to a great, uh study about bacteria that produces gold. Yeah. I saw this and I was like, oh, you know, finally the medieval alchemist's dream

is realized from the organism level. From beyond the grave. They're groaning with envy like shots if only we had found that, right. Well, apparently what they found is that there um is a bacteria that can turn something called gold chloride, which is this toxic chemical. Anything that has the word chloride in it tends to be pretty nasty for people. Hey, what about sodium chloride? It tends to be if you break that, If you break that molecular bond and you now have pure sodium and pure chloride,

that's two things that are really bad for people. But I mean, you you put some sodium chloride on your lunch. Didn't you know someone else did? Well? I didn't add any I get enough sodium in my diet, right right? Okay, Well, but so it takes it takes old gold chloride, which is this some kind of nasty chemical. I mean, I've never handled it, but that talk chemical diary that it's it's it's something you don't want to mess with. Um turns it into twenty four carrot gold just pure gold. Yep,

well pure, there's a point one percent impurity. Yeah, so it's kind of like a that old soap commercial nine. But yeah, it's a it's a it's interesting because you think, oh, well, does this mean you could produce lots and lots of gold? Yeah? Is this going to upset the whole gold market? Well, no, it's not. Even though this is pretty amazing that they

can do this. The reason it's not going to devalue gold and turn the world economy on its head, though, I mean that wouldn't have the effect it once had now, I guess um. But the reason that's not gonna happen is the same problem we discussed with ice, aprene and and other stuff. Right. It just it can't make enough fast enough yet that it really matters that that and and and gold chloride's not exactly you know, falling out

the sky. If we're we'd all be dead. But it's uh, it's it's not it's not plentiful, and it does like like in the article you linked me to, they actually talk about how while while one scientists say it takes it takes something that's useless and or or or worthless and then turns it into gold. The article, the guy who wrote it pointed out that in fact, gold chloride costs quite a bit of money to purchase because it's

not gold, not more than gold. It's it's still you would still have a winning proposition by the end of it. But it's, uh, it's not like it's cheap. It's not like it's this weird, you know, we we don't have these gigantic pools of gold chloride sitting just under the surface of the ground. Somebody was like, hey, I found a way to turn Action Comics number one into solid gold. Yeah. Yeah, it's more like, hey, I found a way of turning kryptonite,

like this fictional element into gold. Oh all right, well excellent, um so any but it's still you know, it's kind of a neat thing and that it's another one of those processes that could one day become useful. Should we have an easier way of getting gold chloride? Well, I think it just illustrates that it's not just this chemical like gold. Sorry, Bacteria can create all kinds of chemicals. Sure, yeah, so yeah, we've talked about, um, you know, different kinds

of medications. There are a lot of other drugs that are uh possibilities that that that bacteria could create. So it's it's one of those things where where we could create these little micro factories, and in fact, we could even create micro factories that could work uh in vitro, Like we could have micro organisms that you would inject

into a person to treat diseases like cancer. Oh yeah, yeah, what we're reading about the these like these drug delivery bacteria, right right, So again the bacteria would have their normal natural processes altered by switching out some strands of DNA, and what they would end up doing is they would consume regular stuff, but they would end up producing cancer

killing chemicals. And you would coat the the bacteria with a protein that would essentially turn it into a cancer seeking bomb, so it would seek out cancer cells by the proteins would essentially lock the proteins that are on the surface of the bacteria and the proteins that are a part of the cancer cell would lock together, so it would attach itself to a cancer cell, produce the cancer killing chemical, and deliver essentially chemotherapy to the cancer

cell directly. And the reason damaging all the surrounding tissue, right, because that's the big problem with chemotherapy, right, is that chemotherapy, when you introduce chemotherapy to a cancer patients not smart. Yeah,

it's not smart. It attacks everything, right, It's not just attacking cancer cells, it's attacking healthy cells as well, which is one of the reasons why chemotherapy has so many nasty side effects, why people have to deal with uh feeling nauseated and and having other other really really terrible symptoms. While they're trying to fight cancer. Well, if you were able to create a delivery system that would deliver the chemicals only to the cancer cells, you would drastically reduce

those side effects. You wouldn't necessarily eliminate all of them, but you you could reduce them so that like the quality of life increases dramatically for the person who's undergoing that treatment. Of course, from what I read this, uh, this research is really promising, but it's also not without danger, right because these these little many attackers, you know, the tiny gun ships, if they get loose, they do actually

possibly represent a threat to people. Anytime we're talking about introducing something that's going to have an ongoing active role within a person's body, then clearly you have to be really careful about how it's going to interact. Whether that means it would produce toxins that would hurt the person directly, or maybe it would have an unintended consequence. For instance, it might kill off a cancer cell, but perhaps something else that gives off ends up causing other problems, like

it could even perhaps cause cancer. I mean, it's you know, there are all these things that have to be taken into consideration. You have to do lots and lots and lots of testing before you can ever get to a point where you even have a you know, a patient try this out, um, same thing is true, and you know, maybe we'll we'll tackle this issue in a future episode

of forward thinking. But there are viral therapies out there too that use they do pretty much the same thing right with the tumors, Like they can be targeted to attack, Yeah, you can, you can get. What you essentially do is you take a virus, you crack it open, you remove the virus from its shell. You put into the shell some chemotherapy drug and and a virus. Just to be clear, like it's not as complex as something like bacteria. It's

basically like a shell with some DNA and right. Yeah, in fact, virus is so is so not complex that we don't really have a classification for it, Like it's not easy for us to classify it as life. It's debt not on its own exactly, it's kind of it's kind of in this interesting category all on its own. But you could do the same similar thing where your

same similar thing. You can do the same thing where you coat the virus with the protein, so it seeks out the cancer cell and then injects the chemotherapy drug directly into the cell. Now, in this case, the virus is not producing the chemotherapy drug. It's just a delivery system. So it's like, um, it's like a very smart injection, whereas the other one we're talking about would actually be producing the drug inside of you as part of its

natural process. That we were careful to make a distinction between bacteria viruses, So maybe we should save viruses first, right, exactly, like I said, maybe we'll tackle that. Yeah, we may tackle that in a future episode, just saying that the the approach for cancer treatment is similar but not identical. Right. Uh So, So we've talked about, um, how bacteria can be used to manufacture materials and and can be used

in medicine. But a little bit of what I've read has something even more interesting that it can be used for for efficient purposes in electronics. Yeah. I was reading some of the articles you you sent to me, and they are very interesting. I'm a little curious about a

couple of them. One of them was about how bacterial nano wires could end up being a revolutionary electronic development, and and that got me a little curious because as soon as I heard nano wires, I thought, wait a minute, now, bacteria, you know, you're talking about a single celled organism that's not the nano scale. That's huge compared to the nano scale. But they were specially specifically referring to proteins fibers grow off of the bacteria protein filaments, which are much smaller

than the bacteria. So once I got into that and I saw that what they were talking about, I thought, oh, I see what they're saying. The filaments themselves are on the nano scale as opposed to the bacteria, and that they so nano wires. If you're thinking about the actual mechanism where electrons are getting carried across, it would be across these little filaments, then I have no problem with I'm not sure that the wires themselves would be on the nano scale, because I would imagine the rest of

the bacteria would be there too. But um, but maybe it's just that I'm having a hard time visualizing exactly what they're talking about. But yeah, you could grow nano wires this way, and uh, again, this could make it very useful for all sorts of applications, including things that would need to operate within an organism because electronics it's kind of hard to get the traditional electronics to operate inside an environment, like the same thing with underwater sensors.

Anything that would normally cause a problem because of shorting. Uh, the way the way the bacteria are able to bond together with these these protein filaments could get around that. So that's something that's a promising potential application. Keeping in mind that this is in the earliest stages of research and development, right we are we we can already use bacteria in some types of electronics, right that. There are bacteria that can be used to since the presence of humidity.

This is this is kind of interesting. Yeah, that so that you're talking about that there's this bacteria that you coat with nanoparticles of gold, which unfortunately this eventually kills the bacteria, but it doesn't matter. It will still still work, or at least it works. It works according to the scientists who researched this, it works up to a month after they have died. They called it zombie bacteria. But

you use gold mina. This is zombie cyborg backed area. Yeah, and if you need movie, what is first you start with the gold chlora and you give that to the gold making bacteria. And then what do you do with the gold, Well, you actually have to get it into the you know, make it nanoparticles you have to get into and yeah, on the nano scale, elements can have very different properties than they would on the macro scale.

So for example, silver, silver already has some antibacterial properties to it, but on the on the nano scale, those are very greatly uh emphasized. So you actually can find bandages that have silver nano particles in them because it will help fight off or keep keeping a wound infection free. Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. But you know, the same is true across many elements that when you get it down to the nano scale, they

start to exhibit different features. Well, okay, so we're talking about nanoparticles of gold. Nanoparticles of gold, and they essentially coat the bacteria so that it creates a way for an electronic charge to move. Our electrical charge rather to move across the bacteria. So you think of the bacteria as just kind of a little blip in a in a circuit. Now, if that bacteria encounters water, it starts

to swell. Now, the gold nanoparticles are actually on these little those little filaments on the outside of the bacteria, right, so the bacteria is beard. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a you know, think of a like a hedgehog with these little bitty gold nuggets on the end of all the little bristles. Well, if that hedgehog starts to expand, the bristles start to move further apart from each other, and

it creates gaps between those gold nanoparticles. So if it creates enough gaps, then that electric charge can't move across

the particle the way it did before. And because you're talking about a very very tiny organism, you can get some pretty incredible sensitivity on here, so you can detect very minute changes in humidity, which could be really useful for certain things like imagine a library that has rare works in it that need to be protected at a certain level of you know, dry air, and anything below that level, anything where the humidity rises too much would be a danger. Then a sensor in that environment would

be very useful. Also, same things true for things like clean rooms where you're putting together microprocessors. Obviously, obviously cigar stores. I mean, I don't know how I left those out. Okay, so, uh so we've got bacteria manufacturing chemicals and materials, manufacturing drugs, and we've got them working in electronics and electric circuits in the propagation of electrons. Can they do mechanical work in any way that's useful? Uh? Well, I wouldn't bring

your beat up old Chevy to any bacteria. Just hand the ecoal I wrench. Yeah, that's stick the wrench in the uncooked hamburger. But but oddly enough to work oddly enough, Yes, they can do some mechanical work. Whether or not this will ever reach a point where it's useful, uh, I mean, I'm sure it will. When you talk about miniaturization, if you get things down small enough, you need to have

some way of powering them, right. Oh yeah, if you if you have a little micro fluid I machine, I mean, you're going to have gears that need to operate on the micro scale. Yeah, if it's working on a mechanical basis. Obviously, if it's working on chemical or something that's different. But if it's a mechanical device then yes, so um yeah.

The interesting thing is that the argon National laboratory did an experiment where they made these teeny teeny teeny tiny gears like like I think the three point eight microns across. By the way, you should go look this up and watch this because the video is really cool. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a video. It's on YouTube and uh and also you can find it in lots of different articles. Will link to some in our blog. But uh, yeah.

The the interesting thing here is that they found that by uh putting different levels of oxygen into this mixture, they could induce the bacteria to push across the the gears arms and propel them around in a circle. So if you they could essentially they could create a stream of bacteria teeming in a certain direction I think, and that by doing that, if if they oriented gears properly,

they could turn the gears. Essentially, the bacteria would hit the end like the point of a gear and then stick with it and actually start to slide inward towards the center of the gear while still moving forward, so it actually would turn the gear. But what I want to emphasize is how crazy the scale differences here, because we're talking about um bacteria, which are tiny, tiny, tiny um moving something that is that's tiny to us, but much larger millions of times the size of the bacteria.

So it's bacteria which you cannot see without my powerful microscope, moving something that's bigger than dust might Yeah, which that's that's amazing. Yeah, so you you'd have to think about, you know, get all the people you have ever seen in your life together and moving the empire state building. Yeah, I mean you're talking about and even then, you're not talking about millions of times your size, right, So it

is a pretty phenomenal thing. And uh, if we're able to make that useful in some way beyond getting hits on YouTube, that's awesome. I think it's awesome either way. Like Joe just just stares at me, like I just stared at him. Yeah, I'm gonna punch you after this. Um well, no, in the next podcast we're actually going

to talk about one amazing possible future application. But yeah, um, but these are I mean, if we we've talked about, or at least we've we've all heard about things like nano machines, you know, whether they're nano robots or whatever, we always imagine them as synthetic. They're little things we build like little robots. That right, But we could end

up using a mixture of synthetic and biological. In fact, it's far more more likely that we will use biological material in those those devices, because Nature's built some pretty amazing tiny, tiny tiny things that work really really well. Well we have, I mean, one thing that I talked about when I was writing this episode of the video series is that it's funny how we have total intuition when it comes to engineering things on on the proper scale,

the macro scale. Yeah, things that are about the same size as us. This all makes sense, you know. Yeah, this gear turns, this thing, It all just works. It makes sense. It's it's intuitive. Yeah. Um, when you get down small enough that all breaks down. You just can't do it. We're not good at making things that work on a tiny, tiny, tiny scale. It requires such a level of precision, and also the rules if you get

small enough, the rules change. So but if we look to nature, you know, nature is already there are already examples of stuff in nature that show that this can work. And so either we can take that and manipulate it in some way, or we emulate it in some way and therefore can make uh, our own nano machines and UH and I imagine that a lot of our at least our early work in nanotechnology will still focus on the biological element and it won't be you know, because

that just makes more sense than to go completely synthing. Alright, Well, I think that that wraps up our discussion about kind of the crazy stuff that we're doing with microbes and bacteria. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of Forward Thinking, you know there's something about the future that you're really interested in. There's an application or a technology, or maybe it's just something that you're concerned about uh and about our future, and you want us to to address it,

you should let us know. We have an email address. Our email addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com, or go to f W Thinking dot com and just check out. We've got the blogs there, we've got the videos, we've got this podcast is there. We also have links to our social media. You can get in touch with us on any of those platforms as well. We'd love to hear from you, and we look forward to talking

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