And using indigo, make it anti microbial.

Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?

Premature infants have real problems with their microbial community.

And inside these wells, then microbial communities begin to form.

The microbial cloud, it is right in front of us.

And that means that your microbial hitchhikers are moving with you.

So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.

Here we have the extreme with dead corals, microbial soup and jellyfish.

So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types.

Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes.

So they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum.

Our bodies are comprised of 10 times more microbial cells than our own human eukaryotic cells.

Nowadays, in addressing microbial biodiversity, scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the Pacific Ocean.

The ocean provides a friendly environment, and chemicals detected in the plume of water are also favorable to microbial life.

So what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us?

The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart.

What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials.

If you take a closer look at a root system, you will find there are many, many, many diverse microbial colonies.

Probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you.

And what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine.

Less than 5,000 microbial species have been characterized as of two years ago, and so we decided to do something about it.

We are right now in the beautiful Oreo of existence of at least life on Planet Earth following the first horrible microbial age.

We find microbial life in every part of the planet in ice, in coal, in rocks, in volcanic vents it's an amazing thing.

And so this microbial diversity differs between people, and what people have been thinking about in the last 10, maybe 15 years is, maybe these microbes, this microbial cloud in and on us, and the variation between us, may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us.

And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you.

We have as much time for animals to exist on this planet as they have been here now, till we hit the second microbial age.

He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.

And the what, I think, is that we returned, over and over again, to the Pre Cambrian world, that first microbial age, and the microbes are still out there.

They take the sediment itself, they extract the oil from it, and from that they can produce compounds which turn out to be very specific to particular microbial groups.

So the microbial community can go wrong whether we want it to or not, or we can kill it with antibiotics, but what can we do to restore it?

And so, these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community, this cloud, the non pathogens that live in and on us.

And somehow maybe the microbial community that's in and on me got off, and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body.

And so what I want to tell you about for a few minutes is, what people have learned using DNA sequencing techniques in particular, to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us.

They take the donor ileum, which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community, say Crohn's disease, and they sterilized the donor ileum.

Now what these transplants, these fecal transplants, or the poo tea suggest to me, and many other people have come up with this same idea, is that the microbial community in and on us, it's an organ.

Now you've heard of hydrothermal vents, but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor, there is vast reservoir of microbial activity, which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study.

So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples.

And I can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there, but the reason I want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project.

And excessive use of antibiotics, in particular in children, has been shown to be associated with, again, risk factors for obesity, for autoimmune diseases, for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community.

So, as a take home message, I want you to remember that not only are we made up of mainly microbial cells, but that some of these cells can be truly mind altering, affecting our brain development, function and even our behavior.

And a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system, helps in fighting off pathogens, helps in our metabolism, and determining our metabolic rate, probably determines our odor, and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways.

We purified a chromosome from one microbial species roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here.