Bacteria busters

Bacteria busters transcript

Facilitator: Well thank you so much for joining us, Phoebe. Just to start with, tell us a little bit about what you're working on at the moment.

Phoebe: At the moment I'm finishing up my PhD which is looking at cell division in bacteria. So that basically means that we're trying to figure out how a rod-shaped cell splits in two and it basically does this by a protein that almost forms a belt and this belt's able to constrict and the cell splits in two.

Facilitator: Okay, so for the normal person who's not scientifically minded whatsoever, what does that mean?

Phoebe: It basically means that for an organism to survive, they need to make more of themselves and with bacteria, they just do it by growing bigger and splitting in half. So by understanding the process that underlies that which is lots of proteins and regulation, we can actually try and understand how things live.

Facilitator: Okay, so they're like a dividing protein or something like that?

Phoebe: Yeah, so there's the protein called FDSZ and that's the protein that I work on. It basically forms a belt and it divides the cell into two.

Facilitator: Okay, so how does this apply to the real world?

Phoebe: The main focus of our work, apart from of course just trying to understand an event that's interesting, is the application to the antibiotics field. With antibiotics today, they mainly form into main classes that are targeted by lots of similar drugs, so if you have a drug that stops DNA replication, all the other different drugs stop it in similar ways and the cells become resistant to them very easily. People may have heard of the golden staph or the multi-resistant staphylococcus which is a big problem in hospitals. So if we can target a process that hasn't been targeted before, like cell division, the bacteria can't really form resistance very easily and we have a whole new class of drugs which are able to combat the serious problems we’re having with bugs at the moment.

Facilitator: Does this mean that your research could actually end up underpinning a whole new type of antibiotic?

Phoebe: Yeah, that's really the idea of our research and what motivates a lot of the people in our field is really trying to get at the really nitty gritty of what actually happens when a cell splits in two. If we can understand that process, we can stop it, is the idea. So we can stop the cells dividing and we can stop the infections that are resulting from these multi-resistant bugs.

Facilitator: Wow, that's incredible. How is it that you look at this?

Phoebe: What we use is fluorescence which is a really cool technique that people may have heard of recently through the green fluorescent protein from jellyfish and recently the Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery. What we're able to do is stick the fluorescent protein on the back of the protein that we want to look at. So here I want to look at FDSZ which actually forms the division and what we can see is when we look at it underneath the microscope, we can actually see a fluorescent ring. So we can see this belt forming in the cell and you can see it constricting, so it's getting smaller and smaller and finally you can see two new cells actually dividing.

Facilitator: How on earth do you actually look at these dividing organisms or bacteria?

Phoebe: We use microscopes that have a camera set up on them and we use what's called time-lapse photography and basically it means we've got a cell sitting on the slide and we can take an image as many times as we like and we can see what's happening in the cell at a molecular level which is pretty amazing and it's pretty cool.

Facilitator: What have you discovered so far?

Phoebe: One of the main things that I've discovered is actually looking at this protein and how it assembles. What is so amazing about them is you have a rod, so almost like a cylinder, and you want division to occur at the right time and the right place and that is right in the middle and one of the questions we don't understand is how bacteria find this middle, like how they actually identify the correct site. They assemble this z-ring there and that actually facilitates the division process. So one of the things that I've been looking at is trying to find how they do that and what actually makes it occur. One of the more interesting things we found, and purely by looking at it with these advanced techniques of imaging such as GFP, is that it forms a spiral as well, so you can imagine a spiral going around a cylinder and that is actually really dynamic and it's moving in the cell and then that kind of coalesces like a spring almost and that forms this belt which enables the cell to divide.

Facilitator: So in some ways you're trying to outsmart the bacteria, work out how they behave?

Phoebe: Exactly. Bacteria are regarded as simple organisms and that's of course one of the reasons we work on them, but since they are so small where we're talking about one micrometre thick and five micrometres long, it's really hard to see what's happening inside of them. We always thought it was just random and not really well controlled, but the more we look, the more we see that it's really organised and it's also really hard to understand.

Facilitator: Tell me how this works with other people's research around the world. Are you working collaboratively with other people?

Phoebe: Yeah, one of the amazing things about science is that it's completely global, especially also doing a PhD it's recognised as qualification around the world. So I can work wherever I would like especially in whatever I like. We collaborate with a lot of people like in the US and in England and places like that and it tends to be not really a race to try and answer the same questions, but working in collaboration to try and solve these problems as best we can and look at them in different ways and using other people's expertise. There's a lot of techniques that people know or a lot of equipment that they have that can help you try and answer the questions that you're asking.

Facilitator: I think people quite often don't think of science as being quite glamorous, but here I am hearing about you collaborating with people around the world, and I imagine there's opportunities for you to do a bit of travel.

Phoebe: Yeah, definitely. The great thing about science is that there's a lot of conferences and they're always in amazing places. I've been to conferences in Denmark and the US and stuff like that and it's just so you can talk about your research with people who are doing similar things and it's a really inspirational environment because they're looking at things that are interesting to you and they're trying to answer questions that you're trying to answer and they might have amazing knowledge. It's really great.

Facilitator: How long do you think it'll take for your research that you're doing now to actually start impacting beyond the lab?

Phoebe: My research will hopefully work in cohort with the big pharmaceutical companies. So FDSZ, the protein I work, is essential for division to happen and we have those companies working at the moment to try and develop drugs that stop the division process by inhibiting the protein FDSZ. So hopefully what I understand about FDSZ can help them in their ability to make drugs targeting this protein.

Facilitator: Okay, great. Well thank you very much for talking to us, Phoebe, and I hope that you win your race against the bacteria.