The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium.

I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores.

This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule.

And so we see a mushroom here sporulating.

You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria.

I was able to morph the culture into a non sporulating form.

The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection.

The Life Box you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom.

And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground.

Consider the fungi including mushrooms, rusts, molds and many disease causing organisms.

To take an example close to home there are over 500 species of bacteria now known friendly bacteria living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria.

And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars.

What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs?

And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony.

And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia.

Our first task was a 5,000 letter code bacteriophage, a virus that attacks only E. coli.

So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication.

This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma.

Here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned actually from green to black because of a black fungus, sooty mold, which is covering it.

The left hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria.

Watch me,I'll build a house twice as big right across from this one.

An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium.

Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way.

And we know staph can do amazing things.

So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual.

Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi.

So then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

Dr Noah's bacillus? Now, Jimmy, even you wouldn't release germ warfare.

This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis Agarikon.

They all have a species specific system they have a molecule that says me.

And the focus when I'm talking about the diarrheal organisms, as well as the focus when I'm talking about any organisms that cause acute infectious disease, is to think about the problem from a germ's point of view, germ's eye view.

The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it.

So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates.

The mycelium absorbs the oil.

She wondered if he'd ever look the same.

And so, as I was thinking about this, I focused on this organism, which is the El Tor biotype of the organism called Vibrio cholerae.

The hope is that these will be used as broad spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria.

I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi fungi that kill insects.

And what you're looking at with this namibiensis is the biggest bacteria we've ever seen.

A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it.

But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non sporulating form.

And what's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies, the babies also have the virus DNA in them.