These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

At the end of 1987, the scope of the biological weapons work was further expanded and research into additional bacterial agents, such as Clostridium perfringens and fungal toxins, such as trichothecene mycotoxins, was carried out.

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

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

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.

You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs.

Lichens arose as a co op. Fungi married algae ...

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.

Whether the humans survive or don't survive, these things are going to be living on this planet or other planets.

The bacterial genes express proteins that are toxic to corn boring insects, but that are harmless to birds, fish, and mammals, including humans. As the modified corn fends off insect pests, it also reduces the levels of the mold Fusarium, thereby reducing the levels of fumonisin.

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.

I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial.

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

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

There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life.

Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years humans, couple hundred thousand.

And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human.

Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health.

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

One of the interesting things about these particular guys is that they're in the actinomycete and streptomycete groups of the bacteria, which is where we get most of our antibiotics.

And so far in the H5N1 cases in people, similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all.

They're a tiny fraction of an inch long, and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease.

Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings.

This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma.

When humans began to move out of Africa, they carried some of their pathogens to new areas, where they switched over to native hosts while native pathogens took up residence in the newly arrived humans. Agriculture and urbanization subsequently exposed us to yet more pathogens.

So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels.

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

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

And we know staph can do amazing things.

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead discovering deadly new viruses where they first emerge passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa before they claim millions of lives.

f Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction (1972).

And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before.

Moreover, certain viruses size and genetic repertoire is comparable with that of bacteria, archaea, or small eukaryotes. Indeed, the life of giant viruses is as complex as that of like sized microorganisms.

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

Every life form on this planet every insect, every bacteria, every plant, every animal, every human, every politician is coded in that stuff.

Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in?

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.

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

And the very first day that this fellow, John Allen, walked in, to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive, the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin, or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something, fungus.

What they're getting at is that on the back of this crab the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals.

Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow in the dark bacterium that lives in the ocean all bacteria have systems like this.

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.