Dr. Glen D’Souza

So I think that's an important area of inquiry in at least my field.

Yeah.

So typhoid, for instance, or cholera, right?

So the bugs we study are essentially the causative agent of cholera.

And one of the ways cholera can survive in our bodies, or even salmonella can breach our bodies, salmonella is the causative agent of typhoid.

can breach our bodies is one of these killing systems right so if you study the systems in more detail or essentially what shields might work against this system then essentially you can create a sort of a barrier for salmonella to not enter my epithelial cells in my intestine or cholera to not infect my gastric layer right so so so yeah if you could target those bacteria i think that would be one

Wounds, for instance, Staph aureus creates these pus-like wounds in the burn patients.

We don't have a way to cure, but we have antibiotics, but Staph aureus essentially becomes resistant to any antibiotic out there.

So you can create living killers and you can introduce them.

Again, a long shot, but it's possible.

I think of the ocean as a giant human gut.

Really?

Yeah, I think the reason we study the ocean is, I mean, yeah, we want to know more about the ocean, but I think the ocean is a simpler place to study, but you can have principles that are translatable, right?

So, for instance, I eat a lot of food, the microbiome digests it, and that's broken down and given to the cells in my body in the ocean.

algae produce a lot of food.

Bacteria now take all this food, break it down, give it to our organisms.

So essentially the same processes happen in two different places, right?

So I think we can learn a lot of things that are immediately transferable, right?

How do bacteria break these things down?

How do bacteria kill and get nutrients out?