My laboratory gets in and explores
and we really explore a world
that’s invisible to the naked eye.
And so, if we take a look at
these scanning electron microscopy images
you’ll get a closer view.
So, we are looking in now, at over 3000-times zoomed
and you can see our inner intestines
there are all of these cells
that are– turns out aren’t our own cells
but are actually microbial cells.
Largely bacteria but also viruses and fungi and protozoa
that inhabit our bodies.
And the same can be said about
virtually every exposed environmental site on our bodies
and so, here is a picture of the mouth
where you see not really our own cells
but other microbial cells.
And so, I think that you can see from these pictures that
these are actually really, really like habitats
that are within our own body world.
And it turns out that they are not passive members either.
They form communities and they interact
and they divide and replicate
and they even wage wars against each other.
These microbes outnumber at our own human eukaryotic cells ten-to-one.
And this actually means not ten-times amounts of genes
but it turns out that for every human gene that we have
there are over 360 bacterial genes.
So, they outnumber our own human genomes.
And we are just starting to learn about what they can do
and how we’ve co-evolved with these microbes
to influence our own biological function.
These microbes are very diverse.
So there are over 10,000 unique species that inhabit us.
And they outnumber greatly all of the disease causing microbes
or pathogens that we are used to studying in the laboratory.
And so, my lab in particular is interested in
how these microbes aside from affecting digestion
and immunity and metabolism,
can influence the brain and behavior.
So, in terms of brain and behavior
one thing that’s really important to note is that
the brain itself is a very complex organ.
But adding on to that another whole layer of complexity
is that the brain doesn’t act in isolation.
It responds to the needs and experiences
of all our other body sites.
And so, the microbiota, as you know, as an important organ
turns out to feed into brain and behavior as well.
Many, many conditions now are known to be linked
to changes in the communities of microbes
that inhabit our bodies.
And some of these,
also include neurological disorders.
The frontier of this is to see whether we could use bacteria
to really hack into brain function
a relatively inaccessible area.
And so, we really need to study in these–
in these diseases whether we can use microbes
to cause or correct diseases.
The implications are huge, because microbes we know
are relatively accessible by us.
We know how to engineer them and modify them
and eradicate them if we need to.
And in our bodies they colonize persistently.
And the idea is can we use these microbes
to treat neurological disorders
in a relatively non-invasive way to provide long lasting impacts
and with regulatory controls that we build in and design in
on these microbes when we modify them.
Thank you very much.
( applause )
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