Betül Kaçar

But bacteria is in your dinner.

Bacteria is in your gut.

Bacteria is helping you along the way.

So we do invite them for dinner.

Well, they get themselves invited in a way.

And they're definitely older and definitely very sophisticated, very resilient than anything else.

As someone working as a bacteriologist, I feel like I need to...

defend them in this case because they don't get much shout out when we think about life.

We study a variety of different bacteria depending on the questions that we ask.

We engineer bacteria.

So ideally, we want to work with bacteria that we can engineer.

Seldom we develop the tools to engineer them.

And it depends on the question that we are interested in.

If we are interested in connecting the biology and geology to understand the early life and fundamental innovations across billions of years...

there are really good candidates like cyanobacteria.

So we use cyanobacteria very frequently in the lab.

We can engineer its genome.

We can perturb its function by poking its own DNA with the foreign DNA that we engineer in the lab.

We work with E. coli.

It's the most simple in terms of model systems goes.