good afternoon i mean vonn step for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations today we learn about the crisis of antibiotic resistance a potential solution and the ways that bacteria for oil attempts to destroy them both in nature and in medicine our guest is gautam donta us professor of pathology in immunology biomedical engineering and molecular microbiology at washington university school of medicine in st louis missouri dr donta slab combines genomic and computational technologies to reveal why antibiotic resistance develops so readily making a number of diseases very difficult to cure the work of the dump this lab is truly comprehensive and has uncovered fascinating microbial mechanisms important in both medicine and for science in general we're connecting with dr don to us via google hangouts and we appreciate the opportunity to learn about the discoveries in innovations of his lab dr don to us welcome and thank you very much for joining us today and we're going to learn a lot you've done some all this remarkable work on the antibiotic resistance we have apparently a really bad situation with antibiotics could you give us a little background on that please and then produce these compounds and it changed the face of the treatment of infectious diseases so used to be that the potential for death from a pretty you know simple scratch or infection was pretty high and the microbes completely resistance but the good news was that while that was occurring sort of predictable that evolution would occur with resistance with all of these new drugs coming to market this incredible i plant harvesting nature's bounty if you will but unfortunately and i will spell that out on the screen but could you give us a couple of examples like that where we are really in danger at this time yes yes so you bring up a good point that you know all the bugs are not created equal and so there are ones that are more dangerous resistant infections and obviously there's a huge toll in terms of just those lines lost but also the folks who do survive the treatment and the days lost in terms of the hospitalization also includes an incredible burden on both the u work and i think that you have pointed out they go after everything not just the bugger that i want to get clarified and then how they would develop that resistance what is there about bacteria or microbes that since the sort of advent of the better a kingdom you know millions of years ago of having protection mechanisms against known barner abilities and so this is jumping the gun to kind of make sense of intent but why an as one of these organisms that has this ability where over kind of can get itself or and not get the microbes and the antibodies so that's one mechanism of resistance not the two mechanisms of resistance that are pretty tacky related are modifying the antibiotic itself so basically breaking down the on smart and so that can either happen through cleavage so the actual you know cutting of this description of the antibiotic or but actually decorating it actually adding some chemistry on to the well well so far it sounds like intelligent life and we ought to respect them a little more maybe but i'd like also tout a shift and spend most of our time on your lab you have done some remarkable things and you have a group of people that have worked all over the world and discovered a number of remarkable features of the the microbial world in general but of these antibiotics in nature so to speak that they're just everywhere but in any case this very special lab you have a multiple approach  to getting at this stuff can you explain like what you're looking for in general and you have ninny wonderful examples in that lab really  sort of within the umbrella of aid recognizing that microbes live everywhere around the planet in communities and a lot of the functions both in terms of responding to put addition and that included resilience and mechanisms of resistance are the reason it matters is because of two things one is the microbes themselves can transmit across these artificially defined habitats like humans but you might call it something environmental risks or clinical replication those mistakes of the population never can sometimes be problematic deleterious and sometimes can be beneficial or best under selection pressure so what a picture of what that means because they have massive populations and it divides very quickly is every time a new better is made by cell division you know the new guys that are made exponentially have slight variations in the bacterial genome and sometimes those variations just by chance might get the better of a resistance property it might change that target that i mentioned earlier so that's one way in which resistance are cars right and again that's exactly how it basically all life of course but you're also have access to other incredible and very easily exchange them back and forth right and so what that means is in one single event one molecular event over the course of seconds that is charlie susceptible to many and then we can ask the sort of the risk of those transfers occurring and eventually causing problems and right ok then i had knowing all of that and again you have looked at this all over the place and that this resistance apparently evolves or exists whether people have been exposed to antibiotics and populations and never been exposed in soils everywhere all over the place that resistance is a part of the thing acquiring resistance genes and sort of real time from the existing reservoir of resistance in the soil so that's one of the experiments that we published on in the early days of the lab where we went and we cultured up bacteria from the soil discovered perhaps at least as more bizarre phenomenon inside microbes from that same experiment war where we discovered microbes not only able to resist those antibiotics at high concentrations but that we found m that was that had to be of enormous discovery right there and i think that was what your serendipity about your nobody expected that it is a standing to think that they're very i would like to thank you for bringing up this kind of excessive use of antibiotics is an article just this week they're not going to spring the orange trees in florida you know and it's just very careless and i hope that the public is aware that this is a very serious thing the other being that in netizens people ask for antibiotics just to treat colds which are viral and that's a different thing altogether and i hope people are aware of that now i'd like to get to the your great innovation of creating a synergy i don't if you would explain that to us how that works and i'd like to know what the status of that is  by saying you know ultimately any free action that any living thing makes has consequences and so we speculated that even when a microbe becomes sort of a better microbe from its perspective to become more resistant so why does that happen and so what helped us bigger it out was even though we were trying to evolve resistance against a triple combination we were also defended against each of the confidence of the single compliments and the payers and remarkably even though we did get r case where as a bacterium becomes resistant to one antibody santy barrick a that mechanism makes it more vulnerable to a nd antibiotic antibiotic be going to cease are you become better at resisting one and this is brilliant it's very exciting i am sorry that we have to stop at this time i don't go on for days it's most interesting this is a fabulous lab before we go i do want to mention to the audience that this lab isp pretty famous for your support of all these graduate students and post docs and they i'm sure put in many hours do many talented things but they get re in that lab and it's a big too but it has done wonderful things thank you ever so much for of several things for showing us that the importance of accidental discoveries of things and that  by using multiple good minds you can solve what seemed to be in solvable problem with this antibiotic crisis thanks ever so much and best of luck to you thank you so much you're my