Silver nitrate. raw.

40 grams thorium nitrate ?

And he had potassium nitrate.

At 11AM there is one bacterium.

The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri.

Because nitrate film burns three times faster than paper.

Shosanna has a collection of over 350 nitrate film prints.

200 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I walked into my apartment...

Once upon a time there's this happy little bacterium.

A strain of this bacterium was grown in space.

Is it bigger than the biggest bacterium? We don't know.

Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium.

And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.

It had three chemicals we were really surprised to see sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal.

A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light.

A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it.

When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage.

These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.

And with Madame Mimieux's 350 nitrate film print collection we wouldn't even need explosives would we?

If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare.

Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.

So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like,

This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence,

Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile.

Through the magic of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate I'm ready right now to blow you all skyhigh.

They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA.

What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri.

What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium a multi drug resistant pathogenic bacterium in the same time we give our anti quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives.

Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours.

This is one mechanism by which the bacterium Bacteroides fragilis prevents a mouse version of multiple sclerosis.

At that time, 35 millimeter nitrate film was so flammable that you couldn't even bring a reel onto a streetcar.

There are people who are mimicking the energy harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU.

So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, and it engulfs it and eats it.

And this is the mechanism by which the bacterium called Lactobacillus rhamnosus effects depressive like behavior in mice.

So, up here in the mountains, there's no need for sacks of fossil fuel derived nutrients, it's all done by nature nitrate, potash, phosphate.

What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule.

What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away.

So, by treating mice with this bacterium Bacteroides fragilis we're able to correct core abnormalities, such as the communication deficit that is depicted here.

Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics?

First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism.

But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire.

If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter.

You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire.

But it could be close to zero, if we're thinking about an ant, or we're thinking about a dust mite, or maybe if you consider even a bacterium an animal.

Their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, through a process we now call chemosynthesis.