• Question: How do you think advances in microbiology will be made?

    Asked by naimasultana123 to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 17 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Hi again
      I’m not up to speed with microbiology, this is a subject I did in my degree but haven’t done for the last 20 years, so I think one of the others might be better at answering this. However, if we were talking about genetics, then I’d say that sequencing technologies are what will help make great advances. It is now cheaper and easier than ever before to look at all 20,000 or so genes in a saliva sample, most of them we have no clue what they actually do. Of the 1,000 or so that we can interpret, what would you want to know? It is this that will have a big impact on healthcare and personalised medicine in the near future.

    • Photo: Nick Goldman

      Nick Goldman answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      Hi again @naimasultana123
      The thing I know about agrees with @annamiddleton — nowadays it is getting easier to read all the genes of a bacterium. I’m just getting involved in a study where we will try to use that information to help doctors in hospitals to decide how to treat patients, particularly where the infection is from a bacterium that might be resistant to some of the drugs they want to use. The more we understand about the bacterium’s genes, the better our chances of a good treatment.

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      The most important challenge facing us in the next decade is antibiotic resistance: more and more of our drugs are ineffective against bacterial infections. We need to develop new antibiotics.

      On the flip side, bacteria are amazing. Across all the species, they have a huge diversity of genes – potentially millions of them. It would be great to be able to harness them to turn them into machines working for us e.g. to make methane gas, to clean up environmental pollution, to make new materials.

    • Photo: Jane Charlesworth

      Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:

      I’m a bit biased, but I really think the work my group is doing is going to be a massive advance in microbiology. At the moment when someone gets sick in the hospital the doctors have to take a sample (spit, poo, puke) and grow up the bacteria before they can do tests to work out what they are. Our lab is developing ways of sequencing the genes of the bacteria without growing them (which can take weeks for some kinds of bacteria)–that way we can look at their genes and tell within a few hours of taking the sample what the bacteria are and whether they are resistant to antibiotics.

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