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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

And the bacterium needs tryptophan one of the building blocks of proteins to trigger the cells' appearance.

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

This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light.

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

This transfer of genetic sequences from parasites to hosts could involve hundreds of genes for a bacterium in different hosts. For example, if the bacterium Wolbachia s genes are integrated by different hosts, such as spiders, insects, or worms, the hosts offspring are also descendants of Wolbachia.

In experiments it was found a kind of tolerance promoting immune cell appears in mice that carry a specific bacterium in their guts.

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.

The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year.

If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying something like, These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.

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.

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.

By using the best evidence available at the time, hundreds of additional deaths were avoided. If government officials in London had demanded absolute certainty, the epidemic might have continued for another 30 years until the cholera bacterium was identified.

So occultists now will no doubt have a fine time with the fact that Craig Venter was the driving force behind the team of scientists that last month announced that they had created a synthetic form of life a bacterium with a genome designed and created from chemicals in a laboratory.

Tuberculosis is a hidden disease, but a much bigger problem than headline grabbing Ebola. More than two billion people carry the TB bacterium, and at some point about 10 of them will develop the disease, which kills some 1.5 million victims per year (compared to 20,000 dead in the recent Ebola outbreak).

The method of attack (enclosing a virulent strain of the bacterium in letters mailed through the federal postal service) was highly effective in terms of publicity, but a major attack designed to cause a far greater number of casualties (for example by dispersing anthrax via an aerosol) would require a much higher degree of technology.

In May, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, led by Venter himself, synthesized the genome of a bacterium from scratch using chemical building blocks, and inserted it into the cell of a different variety of bacteria. The new genetic information rebooted its host cell and got it to function, replicate, and take on the characteristics of the donor.

On the other hand, Swiss bioengineer Martin Fussenegger correctly observed that the Venter achievement is a technical advance, not a conceptual one. Other scientists noted that the organism is really only semi synthetic, because the synthetic DNA (which comprises only about 1 of the dry weight of the cell) was introduced into a normal, or non synthetic, bacterium.

Others have pointed out that, although the team produced a synthetic genome, they put it into a cell from another bacterium, replacing that cell s DNA. We have yet to build a living organism entirely from bottles of chemicals, so anyone who believes in a life force that only a divine being could imbue into inert matter will no doubt continue to believe in it.

There are people who are mimicking the energy harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell.