At 11AM there is one bacterium.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub typed it correctly.

And in 2011, scientists investigating a plague pit in the city of London were able to reconstruct the genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the Black Death of the 14th century.

It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium.

Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them the result is this.

And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom which is made by the bacterium exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow.

Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow in the dark bacterium that lives in the ocean all bacteria have systems like this.

And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released (Poof!) and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide nitrate, NO3 nitrite, NO2 nitrosothiols.

This cell is looking for foreign objects, bacteria, things that it can find and it's looking around and when it finds something and recognizes it as being foreign, it will actually engulf it and eat it, so if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium and it engulfs it and eats it.