OK.  So why is a scientist at the National Human Genome Research Institute doing research on bacteria?  Good question.  The answer is that there are so many bacteria living on us and inside of us, that the bacteria affect our bodies a great deal!  The bacteria eat and produce waste inside us and on our skin, they interact with our immune cells and our intestines.  Just like we have an extensive amount of cell to cell communication among the cells of our body, so are there extensive amounts of communication between bacteria and the cell of our body.  Sometimes bacteria alter the behavior of the cells of our body, in ways we used to think were only human-human cell interactions.   Additionally, the kind of bacteria that live in and on me may be different from the bacteria that live on someone else.  Could that make a difference?  It very well could!  Obesity or Crohn’s disease may be related to the bacteria in our gut.

First things first, how many bacteria live on us?  And how many different kinds of bacteria live on us?  Dr. Bonnie Bassler, of Princeton University, gives an estimate of these in her Ted talk, at the 2009 TED Conference.  Watch 0:55 through 2:30.  (The whole talk is fantastic, too!)   Number of human cells in the average adult = 1 trillion.  Number of bacteria cells in association with the average adult = 10 trillion.  Even more intriguing, is the number of genes that humans have is about 30,000.  How many different bacteria genes are associated with us?  300,000!

Link to Bonnie Bassler, PhD’s talk at the 2009 TED Conference.

OK, so there are SIGNIFICANT amounts of bacteria on our bodies, enough to affect us.  What are we going to do about it?  Well, we could follow the lead of scientists like Bonnie and Julia and start thinking of our associated bacteria genomes as part of our own!  And that means, of course, that we need to study them as much as we study ourselves.  And this is exactly what Julia Segre’s lab did.  Elizabeth Grice, Ph.D., is the first author of the paper, and she is the post doc in Dr. Julia Segre’s lab who lead the work of the paper.  Dr. Grice sampled 20 different locations on 10 different people, and found out which different kinds of organisms live in each spot.  Each location on our body provides a different climate.  Just like plants on the Earth, different bacteria grow better in a dry environment, while others grow better in a wet environment.  Elizabeth Grice, Ph.D. and her colleagues are out to find out who lives where.  This is basic research.  We don’t know yet how valuable this information will be.  But on Dr. Segre’s website you can see her research is clearly linked to disease and how to prevent it!

For an excellent, and easy to read, write up of Dr. Grice’s paper, you can go to an excellent science blog written by Ed Yong, “Not Exactly Rocket Science.“  Here is the NIH’s press release about the paper.

I hope this entry and links helps present the ideas of the world of bacteria, how much smaller and more numerous they are than us, as well as the idea that the things that that occur on the cellular level have big impact in our lives.

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The Virtual Science Fair……

The ability to convey scientific concepts in an engaging way is important. Our society and government, every company and every family must address problems of molecular science every day… No, really, we do! How does chemical pollution kill animals? Why is heating food in a microwave bad for us? No one wants to hurt the environment or eat harmful food. But who knows what the data is and who knows how to interpret it? And who can explain it to me, my grandmother, and my congressman so that we can all make smart decisions about recycling, plastics, cooking, whether to use detergents… etc?

Who will explain the science of tomorrow to us? It will be the students of today. And we, at The Federation of American Scientists and at Hotchalk, are happy to have an opportunity to train the science interpreters of tomorrow. The Virtual Science Fair requires students to make a 4 minute video in which they explain a scientific concept of their choice. The video format may be 1) a recording of a particular experiment that the students designed and performed, 2) a song/poem/performance art, or 3) a computer generated/photographic video with no actors. Each video must address all aspects of a scientific presentation: Background and significance, Choice of methods, Experimental procedures, Analysis of results, and Discussion of the relevance of the results.

Watch the winning videos and see for yourself how a few high school students.

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The first topic is Nanotechnology.

The Nanobot in our game, Immune Attack is constructed of so far unspecified materials.   For Immune Attack 2.0, we would like to specify how our Nanobot is constructed.  We are currently working with McKinley Technology High School engineering students to answer some basic questions.  So far I have asked the students, what material could we use to build a submarine that is a the size of a cell?  How much pressure would it be able to withstand?  And could we build a “ray gun” that is this small?

National Geographic article about Nanotechnology

POLICY about Nanotechnology.

Here is the summary of a talk that was given recently on concerns about nanotechnology and what kinds of concerns we should have about constructing things that are so small that our cells can absorb them.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/0310nano.shtml

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