PubhD powers into the new year, celebrating its third birthday. The format hasn't changed in those three years – three local researchers each have ten minutes to talk about their work, followed by a twenty-minute question and answer session..
First up is Ruth who is researching predatory bacteria that could save mankind from the forthcoming antibiotic resistance crisis.
Microbes have a profound effect on our lives. The bad bacteria get all the press but there are also good bacteria that help with things like food production, cleaning up the environment and the production of insulin. Every year around 400,000 people get a bacterial infection that is resistant to antibiotics. Of those, 25,000 die, including one woman who died recently in the United States despite being given 26 different antibiotics. With traditional medicine failing, it's time to think outside the box.
Bdellovibrio is bacteria that eats other bacteria. Once it has hunted down its prey, it digests a hole so that it can get inside. Then it seals up this hole so that no other Bdellovibrio can get inside. It then eats the bacterium from the inside. It then replicates and out from the dead husk burst around five Bdellovibrio, ready to hunt their next victims. All of this happens in around just five hours.
The Bdellovibrio only hunt down gram-negative bacteria, despite being gram-negative themselves (it's almost like being cannibalistic!) Fortunately, most of the really nasty bacteria such as e-coli and salmonella are also gram-negative. The Bdellovbrio has a benefit over antibiotics in that because it uses a number of different mechanisms to attack bacteria, it's very hard for the bacteria to adapt and become resistant. Even if they could, the Bdellovbrio could evolve in time to overcome those adaptations.
It's still a long way from being used in humans though. They have looked at the effects on animals and plant surfaces, for example they tried it on chickens and it reduced the amount of salmonella in their gut. It didn't harm the chickens and the Bdellovibrio survived in the chickens' gut. Shigella affects 160 million people every year with around a million dying. Bdellovbrio has been tested in zebrafish and it killed the Shigella.
How does Bdellovbrio move? As a predator, it needs to be able to move well so that it can hunt down prey. It can move in liquids by using its flagella as a propeller. It is also able to "glide" on surfaces where there is no liquid.
There is a very small community researching Bdellovbrio and so progress is slow. The next steps are working out how to "program" it to only attack certain bacteria and how to grow it on an industrial scale.
Key learning: There is also a "vampire" bacterium that sucks out the innards from other bacteria.
Next is Olivia who is researching visual representations of religion in Roman Phoenicia (essentially modern day Lebanon) between 15BCE (the year the Emperor Augustus established Beirut as a city) and 300CE (when coins stop being used in the same way).
Specifically, Olivia is looking at material evidence such as coins and how people practised religion. Archaeology is difficult due to political instability in the region. Also, all of the Roman ruins have been built over again and again. Hence, there is a need to look at more portable forms of evidence – coins.
There was no central Roman control of the coins – they were issued by the city states themselves. This meant that there were over 100,000 different coin types issued throughout the eastern part of the Roman empire alone. Along with remains of temples and festivals, the reverses of these coins provides a huge amount of evidence of how gods were depicted.
Were the designs interesting to the people at the time? As an analogy, if a £5 note was found 2000 years in the future, would our ancestors assume that we were all obsessed with Elizabeth Fry? The sheer quantity of designs seems to imply that they were. There was also a sense of political hierarchy between cities. When a neighbouring city received an honour, there would be an increase in the production of coins to show off the talents of the city that didn't receive the honour.
How was religion practised on a social level? The Temple of Bel had an entire village situated inside it, while people could sponsor parts of the Heliopolis. Hand-pulled carts were pulled through cities celebrating gods. Gods were also represented not just by statues, but also by rock outcrops and fallen meteorites. Religion was a very public and social thing.
Coins often contain certain gods that are important to the cities were they were used. For example, coins from Beirut would often have Poseidon on them as it's a city by the sea. There were also a lot of local gods, for example Aphrodite was depicted on a number of coins but she had a lot of different names. There was an adoption of local gods and they were given Roman names. Does this give evidence to the idea of Romanisation? That Rome came into these "barbarian" lands to show them the error of their ways. Did these cities accept Roman culture? Or was it just a façade and their local culture continued to bubble underneath? Each situation in each region was actually unique and these "barbarians" contributed to Roman culture as well as taking from it.
Key learning: There were over sixty gods in the city of Palmyra alone
Finally we have Simon, who is studying macroecology.
Ecology is the study of the inter-relationship of species, how they interact with each other, other species and the environment. Macroecology is looking at this across the entire planet. Emergent patterns can be easier to see at this scale, for example the latitudinal diversity gradient, where there are vastly more species at the tropics.
What causes these patterns?
- Environmental conditions, also called abiotic factors, for example temperature and rainfall
- Interaction with other species, also called biotic factors, for example predator/prey relationships
- Ability to disperse, for example polar bears are large creatures that are insulated against the cold that hunt seals on the ice. But they only appear in the Arctic, why don't we see them in the Antarctic? It's cold and there would be viable food sources. Well, it's impossible for polar bears to travel there.
Climate and land-use change is happening so quickly across the globe that it is having an impact on these factors. Macroecology is looking into this and seeking ways to change it.
Simon's specific area of research is in lizards in the Caribbean. Lizards are cold blooded so they cannot generate their own body temperature. This makes them much more susceptible to climate change. Can climate models be used to predict the spread of Anolis lizards across the Caribbean? If we know where they are living now, we might be able to tell where they will end up if the climate changes, especially since they are incredibly dispersedly challenged, as a lizard is generally stuck on a single island. Hence, it might be possible to predict species diversity across the islands.
Key learning: There are 400 species of lizards in the Caribbean.
PubhD returns to The Vat & Fiddle on Wednesday 15 February at 7.30pm with talks on economics, psychology and chemistry
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