Sujit Dada
speaker
81 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Sujit Dada’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so what we did is we designed experiments where we're actually able to use a microscope to watch
individual bacterial cells in mucus as they grow and divide.
And what we found was really surprising.
When the mucus was thicker, more concentrated, as in many of these respiratory disorders, the bacteria, instead of just growing randomly as they usually do,
they seem to form these interesting clusters.
They stuck together and they formed these clusters.
We call them cables because they grow as these elongated structures that look like phone cables.
And that was really interesting.
And because we come at these problems from using the tools and perspectives of physics and chemistry, we were able to actually use theories from physics to make predictions about when that will happen.
under what conditions for example for a given microbe and a given composition of mucus when that weird kind of clustered growth would happen and now we can actually quantitatively predict that and so because we have this understanding of when these weird growth patterns emerge in mucus
Now you can start to think about, okay, what are ways I can, for example, modify that mucus by delivering enzymes to alter its molecular properties to shift yourself from being in the regime where bacteria will grow in these weird ways to...
more normal growth.
And our discovery, I think, sets a foundation where we can start thinking about these problems in a quantitative way, framing hypotheses that researchers can keep testing and building off of.
And so that's just one example of something that gives hope to people who suffer from these conditions.
I love that.
That's a beautiful example of how ultimately we're guided by curiosity.
And we're curious about the way the world works around us.
But driven by that curiosity, we tried to design very careful experiments, very careful theoretical models.
And just like you mentioned, the discoveries that are made in this context, it changes how people think about something entirely that then helps guide, okay, how do we treat this now?
Now that we know that COVID is transmitted through aerosols, that now opens up ways to try to treat it.
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