We genetically engineer bacteria.

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

It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material.

So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it.

Some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now, and that makes them even more difficult.

Epigenetic inheritance occurs not only within individuals during their development it also occurs between generations individual yeast cells or bacterial cells can transmit epigenetic variations from one generation to the next, and multi cellular organisms can transmit them through their sperm and eggs. If the epigenetic state of its germ cells is altered during an organism s development, this variation can be transmitted to its descendants.

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.

(b) Genetic medicine

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.

It is too soon to discount genetics, however, because the science of epigenetics the study of mechanisms for turning genes on and off, thus changing the way a cell develops without altering the genetic code is gaining traction. Indeed, the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for revolutionizing scientists understanding of how cells develop by reprogramming DNA and cells without altering their genetic structure.

And if we started looking into that genetic information, we'd see a number of usual suspects out there of course, a lot of human genetic information, but also bacterial and viral information, mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose.

As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria.

The definition of pathogenic germs indicates any micro organism able to cause infectious disease.

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

Drugstore Geneticist

A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand.

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.

The Age of Epigenetics

These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells.

I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other.

Genetics for the People?

Now I'm not a geneticist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the genetics.

They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA.

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

Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life.

And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off.

Genetics, Natural Resource

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

The Cultural Bias of Genetics

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.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

And we know staph can do amazing things.

This field has now come to be known as optogenetics.

There's pharmacogenomics, the combination of pharmacology and genetics tailoring drugs to our individual constitutions that Juan talked about a little bit earlier.

In May, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, led by Venter himself, synthesized the genome of a bacterium from scratch using chemical building blocks, and inserted it into the cell of a different variety of bacteria. The new genetic information rebooted its host cell and got it to function, replicate, and take on the characteristics of the donor.

This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell.

This is the bacterial Esperanto.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

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.

Researchers often believe that their mission is to uncover new biology and genetics, and that someone else will translate them to the clinical arena. Accordingly, many geneticists have worked on big science genomics, including genome wide association studies focused on common genetic variation in the human species.

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

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

You will never annihilate the germs.

A piece of paper crawling with germs.

We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them.