 Hello everyone. My name is Ruchir Mundra. I am a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am the lead author on a paper in which we talk about a unique method that we have developed to decontaminate bacillus pores. Bacillus pores are deadly pathogens. They pose a big environmental challenge. They cause a number of diseases like food-borne illnesses as well as are responsible for causing inhalation and thrags. But what makes them even deadlier is the fact that these pathogens are resistant to a number of commonly available treatments like they will be resistant to enzymes, use of other benign com chemicals, organic solvents and so on. The present methods to decontaminate these pores involve the use of very hazardous chemicals, chemicals like bleach and in some cases even heating at 100 degrees Celsius. What we have looked to do is develop a benign method, a more enzymatic method to decontaminate these bacillus pores. What you see here is the structure of a pore which has three layers. The germ cell wall is the innermost layer which is surrounded by a cortex which in turn is surrounded by a coat. This pore coat consists of over 70 different proteins which are cross-linked together. This cross-linking is mainly responsible for making the pore resistant to various enzymes, antibiotics and various other chemicals. What we have looked to develop here is an outside-in decontamination strategy where we start from the outermost layer of the pore and slowly move inwards thereby killing the pore completely. How we achieve this is we have a three-step decontamination strategy. Since there are three layers in the pore, we look to degrade each layer at each step of our process. To start with, we use a combination of proteases and DTT. DTT is a reducing agent which we use in combination with proteases to degrade the coat. This step is the most critical aspect of our work. This is because the present methods to remove coat involve the use of SDS urea such denaturants as well as sometimes they even use heat. Now in environmentally relevant settings, using heat becomes impractical as well as we want to avoid the use of detergents due to their associated toxicity. Our method, we bring about the same coat degradation as achieved by conventional methods without using any of those things. What we use is essentially just a protease and a DTT. We have identified unique proteases which are capable of selectively degrading the pore coats of bacillus cirrus as well as bacillus anthracis. Now we invite you to read our paper in much more detail in order to understand how we identified these proteases and how we analyze this coat breakdown in much more detail. Moving on, we use lysozyme and slab in the second step to degrade the cortex. Lysozyme or slab are known to hydrolyze the cortex but they work only on those pores whose coat has been completely removed. So our hypothesis here is that proteases will be able to break down the pore coat and then lysozyme and slab will be able to hydrolyze the cortex causing germination. Once lysozyme and slab are able to hydrolyze the cortex, we want to add pH or Pli-G which are bacterial lytic enzymes which are known to hydrolyze vegetative cell wall. These enzymes are known to kill vegetative bacilli which do not have any coat or cortex. So the complete strategy here would be using proteases to break down the coat, then using lysozyme or slab to break down the cortex and then using lytic enzymes to kill the germ cell wall. Thereby, completely decontaminating the pore. I would like to thank you for your interest and I would invite you to read our paper in much more detail. Thank you for listening.