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 and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide nitrate, NO3 nitrite, NO2 nitrosothiols.

And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide.

What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure.

And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide.

It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans.

We genetically engineer bacteria.

How does nature repel bacteria?

What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light.

But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.

Bacteria are incredibly multi drug resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria.

We heard that bacteria eat oil?

Without water, the bacteria won't survive.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria talk

To take an example close to home there are over 500 species of bacteria now known friendly bacteria living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria.

We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things.

Is your water bottle harbouring dangerous bacteria?

And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them.

Africa,architecture,bacteria,biology,design,sustainability,water

Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing.

The smallest bacteria is about 200 nanometers.

We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide.

So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual.

Mud and minerals become substrate there are bacteria.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

So, the bacteria grows hair on the crab.

Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms true bacteria and one celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.

We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria.

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth.

So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts.

You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria.

The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses.

But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

We think that the skin well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms.

But that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil, just a little handful of soil, in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there.

And so, the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do, or all the bad things that bacteria do.

The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick.

And these are mineral deposits that are also made by bacteria.

We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works.

And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony.

But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria.

Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids.

And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid.

So how does it keep its body free of bacteria build up?

We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants.