Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Sounds of Science is a monthly podcast about beginnings: how a molecule becomes a drug, how a rodent elucidates a disease pathway, how a horseshoe crab morphs into an infection fighter. The podcast is produced by Eureka, the scientific blog of Charles River, a contract research organization for drug discovery and development. Tune in and begin the journey.
Mary:
I'm Mary Parker, and welcome to this episode of Eureka's Sounds of Science. In the course of biological research, scientists encounter some of the strangest life on the planet. Some of the most fascinating specimens are too small to see. They can exist in the strangest and most inhospitable places and have some unusual properties. Joining me to teach me all about these tiny monsters is Ryan Cox, NGS team lead in Charles Rivers Microbial Solutions Division. Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan:
Hey, Mary. Thank you for the warm welcome. It's a pleasure to be here right now.
Mary:
We're happy to have you here and I can't wait to hear more about these little critters, but first, let's get you introduced. Can you tell me about your job and what Genics actually does?
Ryan:
Sure. So I've been working with Genics since I graduated from the University of Delaware back in 2019. Genics as a whole is a microbial identification service laboratory, so we support a lot of other pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, cosmetic, et cetera, QC labs with identifying isolates that they submit to us. So our input are usually unknown, kind of smelly samples sometimes, and we try to provide them a species name for either their bacteria or fungi,
Mary:
And I think we've talked about this on the podcast before, but yeah, basically they're doing the sampling and they send it to you so you can find out what the species is, and that's obviously important because knowing what the species is might help you identify how it got contaminated into the lab in the first place. Yeah.
Ryan:
Yes, exactly. If you have a name to the organism that you are looking into, it narrows down your field of search and it gives you more adequate guidance on how to effectively mitigate that contamination.
Mary:
Yeah, because it's not just about cleaning it up, it's also making sure it doesn't reappear.
Ryan:
Absolutely.
Mary:
So I'd imagine you had come across some unusual microbes in your work. What are some of the most exotic that you have detected?
Ryan:
That's a great question. Well, personally speaking, one of the first projects I was involved with was creating a strain typing assay for an organism that was actually initially isolated from a space filter from Russian Space Station MIR. So yeah, that one when I was looking into the organism was a bit mind boggling just thinking how far the origin of this had traveled to reach our little laboratory in Delaware of all places. But Agen as a whole, we are a global company, so exotic is kind of the name of our game. From doing some digging on published journal articles, I've flagged that we've identified species isolated from Antarctic soil from the mouths of sharks off of the coast of Australia, and even from very extreme conditions such as alkaline soda lakes here in the United States.
Mary:
Speaking of those sort of more exotic ones, let's go to some extreme cases. Can you tell me about life at the sort of ends of the bell curve? For one, you mentioned Antarctic soil. How do those differ from bacteria that exist in maybe more hospitable conditions?
Ryan:
Likely just ties back to evolution itself. These little microorganisms have been around far longer that we as humans, as the species have been around so they can more robustly adapt to their environments. Life inherently finds a way in the case of these Antarctic soil organisms, they have unique properties that allow them to survive long-term freezing naturally, these would be known as siles and they're spoiling for resilience. So they are just very hardy to those conditions. While most organisms that we see, at least referring to bacteria would need some kind of cryo preservative like glycerol to withstand temperatures of maybe minus 20 cent a greater or lower, these organisms are able to thrive in that environment just naturally.
Mary:
I was reading about a little microbe that lives in very cold conditions and its processes were so slow that they weren't sure that it was actually a functional organism in the beginning, and I thought that that was also pretty interesting.
Ryan:
There's an expression called slower than molasses in the winter time for a reason. So almost like sloths, it's slow and steady. Why waste energy if you don't need to?
Mary:
So what about other extreme cases like extreme heat or like you said, they had these species that were on the mere space station, so were they existing in a vacuum at some point?
Ryan:
That is an excellent question. I would be inclined to say that they weren't exactly proliferating in vacuum. Rather, they're the product of just natural human origin and perhaps sometime during the descent or ascent within the space station, they got captured within their filtration system and were able to be brought back and cultivated to just be studied for further examination.
Mary:
That is still impressive. I don't know if I went to space, I don't know if I would come back as functional as that.
Ryan:
No, me neither.
Mary:
What about microbes taken from unusual sources? You mentioned the shark mouths. Can you tell us about those?
Ryan:
This was a study involving, I guess an overarching goal of identifying antimicrobial resistant pathogens within shark's oral cavities. So this would be important for medical treatments for those that happen to get bit by a shark, and the fact that we are isolating organisms that have antibiotic resistant bacteria detected among sharks in these very salt waterlike conditions. It kind of points towards the possibility that sources of pollution from either flushing prescription medications, antibiotics down the toilet, wherever, wind up in the waste stream that leads to the oceans, the sharks, they have gills, it passes through their system and they are able to proliferate there.
Mary:
So you're saying that basically people who might be on antibiotics and then they go to the bathroom and it ends up all the way out in the sea in a shark's mouth. Otherwise these microbes that are in the shark's mouth, they can't be antibiotic resistant unless they've encountered antibiotics. Right,
Ryan:
Exactly.
Mary:
Yeah, that's incredible. That's a really good illustration of how far our reach goes as people and as of sort of polluting species, because we all think know about waste treatment, plants and wetlands, things like that, but all the way out in the deep ocean you think would be maybe relatively safe from our interference, but apparently not,
Ryan:
And I think that too kind of speaks to the resilience of these little monsters as this podcast is so humorously named. It also reminds me of just my introductory biology course in high school, the natural food cycle of things. If our grasses polluted, the insects that are among that grass get eaten by predators and it just spreads simply like that.
Mary:
Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit off topic, but I was looking at a diagram of fish species and the, I guess you'd call them lower levels of fish that just eat krill or little plankton or whatever have relatively low levels of mercury, but the higher you go up fish who eat fish and then the fish who eat those fish, the mercury gets more and more concentrated. So that's when you have to start being careful of the species of fish that you're eating if you eat fish.
Ryan:
I've seen similar studies to that, and I think even in recent news, something about radioactive shrimp being part of a recall from certain chains of grocery stores. So it's best to err the side of caution.
Mary:
Absolutely. Just out of curiosity, you mentioned a high school biology class. Have you always been interested in these tiny monsters, these little critters?
Ryan:
My exposure to biology, and I suppose more specifically microbiology didn't really come to fruition until I started working this job. I was exposed to a lot of the concepts, especially in college. I think one of the classes I best performed in within my chemistry curriculum was actually biochemistry focusing on PCR and DNA itself. I was very fortunate just throughout my education as an adolescent into my formative college years in my professional journey now to have so many passionate, just scientific champions, and it's all about standing on the shoulders of giants as we might commonly hear, just sharing our knowledge and inspiring people to really pursue their whys and want to find reasoning.
Mary:
You could also say that you're standing on the shoulders of tiny microbes. The more you learn about them, the more impressive that can be.
Ryan:
We would not be standing if it were not for them, so I couldn't agree more.
Mary:
That's very true. So what about microbes with unusual properties, for example, what are some microbes that could be beneficial for things like pest control?
Ryan:
So an example of that would be perhaps organisms that might be found from decaying plant matter or other livestock. An example of this would be from a source study detailing bioactive secondary metabolites from co species. So there's a unique application to these covar species, certain kinds such as co Jenny CU and cova al. They were isolated from diseased apple tree leaves and these organisms were cultured. They were actually sent to one of our ACU genetics labs for identification, and these two species in particular have very similar sequences for the ITS region for how we identify our fungi, but as far as their properties are concerned, they produce these antifungal and cytotoxic metabolites. So in essence, if we can kind of harness their cultivation, we might be able to leverage these tiny little monsters as forming a natural pesticide, something where we could use for agriculture without needing to worry about detrimental effects with post human consumption.
Mary:
That would be pretty cool. Anything that can be used in a natural way to mitigate effects that we don't want, I think is a bonus, especially when they've been studied as extensively as these have.
Ryan:
Yes, absolutely.
Mary:
I also read about some types of microbes that could conceivably be used in heavy metal pollution mitigation because they either are resistant to heavy metals or they can break them down into smaller constituents. Are there any other examples you can think of? Useful bacteria
Ryan:
Relating back to these Antarctic soil bacteria. There've been different species of pseudomonas identified and spora cina species. Since they have this natural resilience to these harsh cold conditions, there's at least reason enough to believe that we could find potential enzymes with them that help them stabilize at these low temperature, so we could leverage them into making either cryo preservatives or even perhaps propagating food in more harsh conditions for colder times of year to extend farming seasons.
Mary:
Oh, that would be very cool. Do you have any favorites among these more interesting microbes?
Ryan:
Personally, I wouldn't say I have a favorite among these microbes. I think the beautiful thing about microbiology and getting to be exposed to all these different microbes is the fact that they're naturally surviving in their environments. So anywhere in the world, I think almost akin to having your native plants, your perennials, they thrive in their natural environments, so it's important to understand what it is that helps them survive there, and just how we can look into them to enhance our own survival and benefit others,
Mary:
I like them for their potential to teach us about life that could exist on other planets. I know that that's something that we probably will never learn in our lifetimes or several generations of lifetimes, but I do think it's interesting that the more harsh conditions we learn that are habitable, the more we can imagine that maybe even on the moons of Jupiter, there are little microbes floating around.
Ryan:
It really is a promising, and I personally think a likely case if there's going to be any life found outside our earth, I think we're going to have to start with these small cellular little monsters before we can find aliens, as we might commonly know.
Mary:
On the opposite track from favorites. Just out of curiosity, are there any little guys that if you've discovered them or you detect them and identify them through genics, it's a big problem. They're hard to mitigate or they can be difficult to clean up?
Ryan:
I would say any organisms that can produce biofilm are very difficult to control. Many basil species kind of fall under this umbrella term. They just have such natural resilience and can clinging onto just about any surface and not want to let go, and then just begin slowly but surely expanding their little colonies.
Mary:
Are there any microbes that you think should be studied more closely? What are some of the great unknowns?
Ryan:
I think microbes that are detrimental to food production are always worthwhile for looking more into how we can either deactivate their detrimental effects to our crops or livestock. I think any kind of antimicrobial resistant pathogens are always going to be worthwhile looking into. If we can prevent human infections or detrimental side effects from being exposed to these organisms, especially in immunocompromised or young patients, that's always going to be worthwhile to pursue further treatment and study.
Mary:
Well, thank you so much, Ryan, for joining us for this pseudo Halloween episode of Sounds of Science, and I look forward to learning more about these little guys.
Ryan:
It's been an absolute pleasure. Mary. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope this has inspired some further reading from any listeners' ends.
Mary:
I hope so too.