Man-Made Horrors: June 2025 The antibiotic resistant edition
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Man-Made Horrors for Your Pleasure!
Some of you may be aware that we have begun shipping our DNA construct at last. The DNA printer service we used encountered some contamination issue with our batch and it had to be reprinted. The DNA passed our internal QA 2 weeks ago and the orders are now out the door and on the way to whomever ordered some. We now have a stock of DNA on hand ready for a more expedited shipping, so if you’re in a hurry for some Electric Blue, we’ve got you covered.
As mentioned last month, we’ve been trying to increase the amount of shorts we put out, and we’ve been pretty good with our uploads. Obviously Justin’s trip did cut a bit into that, but more short format man-made horrors are on the way.
From the Cutting Room Floor
Well I hope you all appreciated the forbidden omelette [link to short]. We were most definitely not expecting it to be so… solid. Honestly it’s mold, I don’t know what else we should have expected. If you’ve missed our last video [link] where we grew a couple litres of penicillium chrysogenum in our custom designed bioreactors. As we get the chance we try to tinker and upgrade the system. Currently only one shelf out of the planned two is operational and we’ve had to rework the lid seals considerably. Our system allows the entire bioreactor to be autoclaved and that has had some serious impacts on the design and selection of passthrough an instrumentation.
An important note about Penicillin is that the naturally occurring strains have already lost a lot of their potency against many of the diseases it was used to treat. Biology and genetics specifically is a game of numbers, and if you expose organisms enough times to a certain agent they’ll eventually develop a resistance to it. Whether this happens via a mutation in the target bacteria or a lateral transfer of DNA from another bacteria already resistant to the antibiotic. This has become a major issue for modern medicine, and according to the WHO, 5 million deaths annually are associated with antimicrobial resistant disease.
Antibiotics are a wonderful development that has transformed the way we live today and just as steel made the modern industry possible, antibiotics have made modern medicine what it is today. But as a society we have to be judicious in our use of them if we don’t want to be inundated with super bugs. And so we have to develop new methods to cure or prevent infections. The first and obvious one proposed by the WHO is an increased vaccination against a myriad of diseases. Most vaccines protect against viral infections, not bacterial (there are exceptions, welcome to biology, there’s always an exception), but many medical complications leading to deaths are in fact co-infections of both viral and bacterial origins. By vaccinating more people against more disease, we gain a twin benefit. Not only would we be reducing co-infection events and their associated complications, but we would be reducing the amount of sick people seeking antibiotics for viral infections. This would reduce the net amount of antibiotics inappropriately prescribed and would go a long way towards reducing the speed and spread of antimicrobial resistant diseases.
It’s important to note, this won’t stop the spread of antimicrobial resistance, but it’ll give us more time to find viable alternatives to the current set of antibiotics used. We hope to explore the cutting edge field of antimicrobials more this year and we’ll take you along for that ride!
In The Works
Like we mentioned earlier Justin’s back from Paris and we’re all looking forward to a show and tell, which should be coming out later this month. In the meantime we decided to pick up a project that had been on our To Do list for a long time. A little fun project that will add both functionality and pazzazz to the lab space! It’s a small thing but we took our usual ‘Go big or go home’ approach, and of course we held true to the man-made horror motto. These smaller projects which are a little bit less technical really help us blow off some steam and remember to have fun with all of this. Of course we’ll be back to all our projects, as many of you may have noticed we do return to almost every project, nothing is ever fully done in science after all.
Neat Finds
Can cuttlefish communicate with each other?
Cuttlefish are the cutest, you've heard it hear first, but they also apparently use sign language which definitely cements their position as the cutest!
