The Microscopic Chemical Warfare Of Antibiotics

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2017

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Research isn't always conducted in a laboratory. Dr. Brian T. Murphy runs a research program that takes him all around the world collecting aquatic microorganisms, en route to the discovery and development of new antibiotics. On this podcast, Dr. Murphy explains how antibiotics work and the importance of discovering new ones, as well as detailing some of the exotic underwater adventures involved in his line of work.

Ongoing projects in Dr. Murphy's lab merge the identification of small molecules with marine microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. To date, his lab has built a collection of over 1,500 aquatic bacteria and are using them to generate small molecule libraries that they screen against bacterial pathogens and cancers. The lab is also innovating the way drug discovery libraries are managed to make them more intuitive and efficient.

Antibiotics research crowdsourcing programs:

Additional scientific resources discussed:

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm curious, why is it so important to discover new antibiotics?
0:05.0	People get bacterial infections and then they take antibiotics to treat these infections,
0:09.5	but bacteria evolve way faster than humans do, so just put in it simply they can see these
0:15.8	drugs and learn how to fight them and learn how to beat them and then they survive and
0:19.5	so then after you know one year five years ten years the treatments that we use are no longer work and so we need to find new treatments Hey, I'm Cody Gough from Curiosity.com.
0:37.0	Today we're going to learn about antibiotics research.
0:42.8	Every week we explore what we don't know
0:44.6	because curiosity makes you smarter.
0:46.7	This is the Curiosity podcast.
0:48.4	The word research kind of has a stigma around it. You might think of a white
0:56.2	sterile boring laboratory with a bunch of microscopes and Petri dishes. So that's why
1:01.1	I wanted to talk to a scientist who goes out on adventures Indiana Jones style for his research.
1:07.0	And that's exactly what I did.
1:09.0	Dr. Brian Murphy will talk about how his research in the field of antibiotics has taken him all across the US and around the world and why his research is so important.
1:17.5	We'll get into some surprising science, plus learn how you can get involved as a citizen researcher.
1:23.6	Dr Brian Murphy is an associate professor at University of Illinois at Chicago
1:27.7	in the Department of Medical Chemistry and Pharmacognacy,
1:31.6	not Pharmacology.
1:32.8	Correct.
1:33.2	What is pharmacognacy?
1:34.4	Yeah, it's a complicated word that basically means
1:37.0	knowledge of drugs.
	...

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