Name: 【TED】Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi: To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language (To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language | Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi)
Uploaded: 2019-04-19T17:45:51.000Z
Duration: 11 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Leslie Gauthier Reviewer: Camille Martínez

building armies with millions of soldiers.

Bacteria live in communities just like humans.

And just like humans, they trick, deceive,

What if I tell you that we can listen to bacterial conversations

and translate their confidential information into human language?

And what if I tell you that translating bacterial conversations can save lives?

and I've used nanotechnology to develop a real-time translation tool

and give us recordings of what bacteria are up to.

In fact, 90 percent of all the live cells in this theater are bacterial.

they help us digest food or produce antibiotics.

To coordinate all the functions bacteria have,

they use signaling molecules to communicate with each other.

like the screams of a man alone in the desert.

But when there are many bacteria, the signaling molecules accumulate,

and the bacteria start sensing that they're not alone.

In this way, they keep track of how many they are

and when they're many enough to initiate a new action.

And when the signaling molecules have reached a certain threshold,

all the bacteria sense at once that they need to act

So bacterial conversation consists of an initiative and a reaction,

a production of a molecule and the response to it.

In my research, I focused on spying on bacterial communities

the electrons will interact with any communication molecules present,

and this interaction will give us information

But what is it like when bacteria communicate?

my first assumption was that bacteria would have a primitive language,

like infants that haven't developed words and sentences yet.

When they laugh, they're happy; when they cry, they're sad.

But bacteria turned out to be nowhere as primitive as I thought they would be.

It can mean different things depending on the context,

just like the crying of babies can mean different things:

it had to be able to decode the signaling molecules

and translate them depending on the context.

Maybe Google Translate will adopt this soon.

I've brought some bacterial data that can be a bit tricky to understand

Here's a happy bacterial family that has infected a patient.

They share resources, they reproduce, and they grow.

Everything is fine, as long as they're working together.

Romeo from Montague has a relationship with Juliet from Capulet.

【TED】Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi: To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language (To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language | Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi)

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【TED】Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi: To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language (To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language | Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktchi)

context

opportunity

reveal

initiative