Antibiotic resistant bacteria are threatening modern society by making antibiotics obsolete. Dr. Nizet is a Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Pediatrics at UCSD, as well as the faculty lead for the UCSD Collaborative to Halt Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes (CHARM). His laboratory studies how the human immune system interacts with microbial pathogens, with particular focus on antibiotic resistant bacteria and how to treat them.

Dr. Nizet discusses how his training as a physician helps drive the research in his laboratory, how repurposing therapeutic drugs could help fight antimicrobial resistance, how taking advantage of host immune responses can enhance the treatment of infectious diseases, how the success of modern medicine is training some bacteria to become pathogenic, how nanobots made from algae can be used to treat difficult infections, and how the environment at UC San Diego contributed to the success of his lab.

This episode was supported by the do-it-yourself mail-order Gram stain kit.*

• Karl Klose, Ph.D. (UTSA)
• Victor Nizet, M.D. (UC San Diego)
• Venus Stanton (UTSA)
• Jesus Romo, Ph.D. (UTSA)

* "Ads" heard on microTalk are for parody purposes only, there are no actual products for sale.

Houston, we definitely do NOT have a problem…with interviewing Dr. Kate Rubins, NASA astronaut. Dr. Rubins is a virologist who has spent over 300 days in space, performing experiments aboard the International Space Station, where she was the first person to sequence DNA in space.

We caught up with Dr. Rubins at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, where she discusses what it felt like the first time she saw the earth from space, some of the difficulties in performing research without gravity, how to study the microbiome of the ISS, how the international inhabitants of the ISS communicate with each other, and the spur-of-the-moment event that led to her becoming an astronaut.

This episode was supported by Cestodium, a new weight-loss program.*

• Karl Klose, Ph.D. (UTSA)
• Kate Rubins, Ph.D. (NASA)
• Janakiram Seshu, Ph.D. (UTSA)
• Jesus Romo, Ph.D. (UTSA)

*The recorded ads heard on microTalk are for parody purposes only, there are no actual products for sale.

Dr. Hyun Jung Kim, an Assistant Professor at Cleveland Clinic specializes in coaxing human cultured cells to differentiate and form tissues resembling the gastrointestinal tract, in order to study microbe-GI interactions. 

Dr. Kim discusses his surprising discovery of how common immortalized cultured cells can differentiate and form something that resembles a gut-on-a-chip, how these guts-on-a-chip can be used to study diseases like inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer, how the addition of a microbiome to the gut-on-a-chip allows the bacteria to retain diversity unlike in a test tube, how the gut-on-a-chip could be valuable for personalized medicine, and the things he misses about Texas since moving from there.

This episode was supported by Eezy Breezy Poke, an elegant at-home vaccine service.

• Karl Klose, Ph.D. (UTSA)
• Hyun Jung Kim, Ph.D. (Cleveland Clinic)
• Janakiram Seshu, Ph.D. (UTSA)
• Jesus Romo, Ph.D. (UTSA)