What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you.

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.

It's used by all different bacteria and it's the language of interspecies communication.

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

The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium.

The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus, killing certain species of trees in the forest.

And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species.

The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri.

And so we use a virus that's a non toxic virus called M13 bacteriophage that's job is to infect bacteria.

United Nations inspectors were able to verify parts of the declarations with respect to Iraq's use of and subsequent destruction of master and working seed stocks.

However, they had noted that accounting for all seed stock obtained from open vials would be virtually impossible, as it could have been widely distributed as secondary seed stock throughout Iraq.

These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it.

And that is the species of organism that is responsible for causing cholera.

You mean, it may carry a disease?

Diarrheal disease organisms get transmitted in basically three ways.

What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri.

Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu ... a href http www.ted.com index.php speakers view id 229 target _blank Read more a .

60,000 species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist.

The first thing that we ever read was in 1995 a little bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae.

So, when you think of odd life forms, when you think of what it takes to live, it turns out this is a very efficient life form, and they call it an archaea. Archaea means the ancient ones.

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.

There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population.

The first one is we've targeted the intraspecies communication system.

So our team developed new techniques for actually growing, cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast.

Therefore, the confidence in the total verification process depends to a large extent on accounting for reference strains and seed stocks of micro organisms.

This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli.

Now, mycelium is an amazing material, because it's a self assembling material.

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

These long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria.

I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corncobs.

What happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin.

Potentially, high levels of tryptophan in the presence of L. reuteri may induce expansion of this population.'

The bottles harboured gram positive cocci, which can lead to skin infections, pneumonia, or blood poisoning.

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

Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms true bacteria and one celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.

You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group.

The danger is that some germ like staph will be will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it.

Professor Colonna said 'We established a link between one bacterial species Lactobacillus reuteri that is a normal part of the gut microbiome, and the development of a population of cells that promote tolerance.

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

But the right hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species.

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

She suspected the difference had to do with the mice's gut microbiomes the community of bacteria, viruses and fungi that normally live within the gastrointestinal tract.

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

It's been estimated that a single ton of soil fertile soil contains approximately four million species of bacteria, all unknown.