 wasted chewing gum bacterium. I mentioned that it appeared in scientific reports like one year ago, but what is this paper about? So the first thing what they did was like asking a question. So we're just surprised to see that no one before had studied the microbial diversity in wasted chewing gums. So we all know that wasted chewing gums are a contamination and esthetical problem in so many cities because they are stuck on the pavement. If the pavement is light and the chewing gums become dark, it's not something very nice to see. And we all know that it takes very, very long to disappear from the ground. So what we did was taking profit that we were on holidays like before the pandemics. And we were all traveling, at least I always do that, with the sterile fiber tubes. And we took samples from different countries of wasted chewing gum stuck on the pavement. So we did that, of course, from Valencia, from Spain, from France, Paris, from Greece, from Istanbul in Turkey, from Singapore. And there were other samples that unfortunately didn't work well because they were taken from Indonesia from Bali. So sorry, and this picture here shows the diversity that we found. The number of samples is not high enough to make a relation between geography and microbial taxonomy. But what we can already say is that it's a huge diversity of typical environmental bacteria there. This already suggested that chewing gums were not simply something inert there, but they were home of a quite amazing diversity of microorganisms. Some of them can be found, of course, in our environments. And no two chewing gums were alive. So there's quite an interesting variation. Another thing that we did back in Valencia was to answer a very simple question. So if you have a chewing gum after a while and people step on it, etc., you get a very, very thin layer of this plastic-like gum or matter attached to the pavement. But even if it's thin, it might have like a couple or three millimeters. So the question was, is it the microbial profile the same in the surface of the pavement or in the internal part or in the one that is attached to the pavement? Because the availability of water can be different. Of course, the effect of irradiation is very different depending on whether you are on top or in the middle part. And then what we did was taking just one chewing gum and slicing it, making like salami pieces of it, one top part, one intermediate part, and one bottom part. And to our surprise, they were basically the same. So you can see in these three histograms down there that they are small faint differences, but basically the composition of the chewing gum, the bacterial composition, is basically the same, which suggests the chewing gum is not something that is sticky and that attached bacteria on its surface because of its stickiness, but it's an environmentally, microbially an environmental environment by itself. And it has a relatively homogeneous distribution of bacteria and other microorganisms inside it. After that, we wonder whether the bacteria that we were identifying there could be able to grow on chewing gum. And in order to answer that question, what we did was setting up a small collection of microorganisms that we isolated from chewing them and giving them as the sole carbon source different compounds. So some of these compounds were ones that we bought and that are regular ingredients in chewing gum, for example, glycerol, aspartame, xylitol, sorbitol, blue sucrose, etc. And another thing that we did was preparing just the suspension of pure chewing gum that we bought in the supermarket and use that as a carbon source, sorry, for the bacteria that we were able to isolate from old wasted chewing gums. And as you can see here in this kit, many of those bacteria are able to use those compounds as a carbon source. And in the petri dishes there, you can see that some bacteria grow much better when the medium is supplemented, for example, with powder, with powdered chewing gum. So they are eating some of the components of the chewing gum. Of course there is a plastic matrix there, which is very difficult to buy at the grade, but the others can be used by microorganisms to eat. Okay, figure A here shows the diversity that we found, the observed diversity, Shannon and Simpson. And basically it follows like an A truth in which the diversity is maximum at the middle and is significantly lesser at the beginning and at the end. But at the beginning, at the end of what? So what we did here was an experiment in Valencia and I think this is something that contributed a lot for us to get the ignoble price because it's a fun experiment. So one of the researchers who did this, Leila Satari, the first author of the vapor, she was chewing gum every day and she was spitting the chewing gum in front of our institute here. You can still see the stains on the floor and then she was able to recover the wasted chewing gums after one week, two weeks, three weeks, etc. So we were able to set a collection of wasted chewing gum, the age of which was perfectly known because it was us who made this and who put the wasted chewing gum on the floor. The first chewing gum was not put on the floor, was a console one, and then we analyzed directly after viewing chewed by Leila. So at the beginning we had the microbial community of her mouth in this case and at the end we have the microbial community that had stabilized on the chewing gum. This central slide shows the diversity, a lot of bacteria at the beginning, very oral mouth bacteria at the end, very environmental ones, and in between, the highest diversity, both of them. And the C-figures shows a principal components analysis in which the classification of all these samples tends to grow according to their age. In other words, as you can see here, sample 1, 2, 3, 4, so the first samples, the ones that were younger, that were just more directly related to the console ones, the recently formed a group, and then samples 5, 7, 8, etc. Another one in red this, and then in purple the other one. So there is a clear relationship between the bacteria you can find at chewing gum and how old that chewing gum has been stuck into the pavement. In order to see that more clearly, what we did was a very simple visualization of our results. So if you took the main, the four main genera that they are present in the console sample, you remember that the console sample was that one that was not stuck on the floor, similarly just recently too. So if you represent that, you get this figure, figure A in which you can see that bacteria that are typical from the mouth are very present at the beginning, this is expected, and then they decrease in frequency, but they can be detected all along this 84 days assay. In other words, bacteria from a chewing gum are full of oral bacteria at the beginning, and once they are on the floor, their presence is decreased, but you can still find them, so they are very stable, at least you can detect them, it doesn't mean that they are alive, that's true. In the figure B here, what we did was something, it's the opposite visualization impact. We selected the main taxa that were present at the last part of the experiment, so day 84, and we made this representation. And as you can see, some of these bacteria have been all the time there, but some bacteria are specifically increasing their presence at the end, and so some of those bacteria are pseudomonas, singomonas, asynetovacter, etc, which are typical environmental bacteria, and some of them would be important by your mediation potential. What are the applications of this? This is a regular question that we got during the massive impact that we had in the media, and this is something that the journalists were asking most of the time. So there are basically like three main applications of your research. The first one is viral mediation, so even if the plastic core of the gum is very difficult to degrade, it beats, at least partial degradation can be carried out by those bacteria, because they are using the vast majority of the components of the gum as we have demonstrated. The second is forensics. So we demonstrated that you can identify the bacteria that are typical for a person in the chewing gum that has been chewed by that person, even if it has been left for weeks or even months on the floor. And it was done in Valencia in summer, you can imagine that. So it's extremely hot, and the degradation of the DNA is not high enough to make us not possible to identify those bacteria. So I explained bio-remediation, I explained forensic. And the other one is disease control. So if we were able to identify so easily those bacteria, I think it would be interesting to find out whether those pathogenic bacteria were viable or not. We didn't do that. And of course, there is also a very important research that should be done on viruses. We understand that viruses do not last a lot on the environment, but it would be nice to see how long they can be viable and whether they could be transmitted. I don't think so, but you never know from wasted chewing gum that is just lead there on the pavement. Anyhow, for obvious reasons, it's not a good reason to let your chewing gum stick on the floor, but you better put it in the wheelchair. So who did that? The first author and the one who was chewing gum for a long time was Leyla Satari. Alba Nguyen, she created all the very nice visualization work and also data analysis in collaboration with Angela Pidal and then myself. So we were surprised when I got a phone call by Marc-Abraham, who was the guy there on top, and he told us that we were awarded an ignoble prize. He didn't tell us what kind of prize it was. And then during the ceremony we knew that the prize that we were awarded was the ecology prize. And these are some pictures that we took or a print screen from the ceremony in which the awards were given to us. Impact. So the impact of that has been massive. This is the first tweet that I made, and you know that in Twitter you have this possibility of identifying a statistic of those tweets, so the statistics of the tweets. So as many as 150,000 people saw that tweet, that's a lot. And 12,000 of them were clicking on it, etc. So this is an amazing number of clicks and more than 1,000 likes, etc. So in terms of impact, this is an amazing event. Then most of you are familiar with Almetrics, which is a way to measure the popularity in the medium of scientific papers. So that paper of ours has a very, I wouldn't say low, but average, popularity was 45, I think. The day before we got the ignoble prize, and just a few days later it was 650. But look at the number there. So 447 people tweet there. That's a lot of tweets. So 46 news, different news. We were on Wikipedia, mainly blogs, etc. So this is a massive impact on the news. This is just a selection. They are not all there of the new newspapers that published our story, and this includes Liberation in France, New Scientist Biotechnics, National Geographic, and several times in El País, who even made an interview to me that was one page in the online version of the journal. So this is an amazing, amazing impact on the medium. Television and radio. We were in La Ventana, in California. We were also in CBS. That journalist there was giving the news of our chewing gum work from South Africa. We were in La Sexta. We were in Brad's. We were in almost every radio, newspaper, and television channel in Spain. And of course we made a song in our acceptance speech. If you haven't seen it, you should immediately see it and watch it. And also we had like 480 likes of this speech that some people have said very kindly that is the best acceptance speech ever. So I guess that the next acceptance speech that we're going to give is also going to be some, if of course my colleagues agree. So the wastey chewing gum bacterium. Lessons from the ignoble price. Novel versus ignoble. One of the most common questions that I got when journalists asked me is would you prefer to have a noble price? Do you think you're going to have a noble price? The second question is very easy to answer. No, I don't think I'm going to have a noble price. Would you prefer to have a noble price or ignoble price? I would prefer to have a noble price because of the money. So in the case of the ignoble price, not only there is no money, but they give you like 10,000 trillions of dollars of Zimbabwe. That means nothing. So there's no money. But I have to say honestly, the ignoble price, getting that was an amazing and very, very funny experience. And having a noble price might be great, of course, for many reasons, of course. But it's a bit too serious, maybe for my character, at least. So research, serious versus funny, this is very important. There is a bad thing about ignoble price is that some people think, and that was my perception at the beginning, that it's associated with bad research. But I was very surprised to see that 99% of the comments that we got and on the comments that were posted on the news that appeared about this were positive. So I think that most of the people are able to make a separation between something that is funny and something which is not good. But it's also true that as the third one highlights the impact on the media and opportunity for communication, every time that I was interviewed, and I have events like dozens and dozens of interviews in the last weeks, I took it an opportunity in order to make some fun at the beginning with the ignoble price, but then explaining to people that in our society, they are bakers, they are, I don't know, teachers, but they are also microbiologists, people who travel with a falcon tube in the luggage in order to try to identify the next unexpore microbial environment. And I think that for common public it's very nice to know, because there are things that they are discovering now within the COVID pandemics, which is the word PCR. So everybody knows about PCR now. But PCR wouldn't have been possible without the extremophilic bacteria living in Yellowstone in thermophilic conditions, from which attack polymerase was isolated and is currently as you all know used today. And this is a very interesting story that people understand, regardless of the information, that looking at something strange like Yellowstone or Westerchillingan can have very practical implications. And then TPI's, so quantitative data that changed after that, and I am talking here as a very personal point of view, my Twitter account is mine and the other office could of course give their numbers. I got like 300 more followers in Twitter, my LinkedIn explodes, I have so many, let's say friends in LinkedIn now are interested in contact with us. Almetrics, it just went from 45 to 650. Media coverage was, as I mentioned, massive. All friends, some people that I knew for a while that were in touch with me and from everywhere in the world, so this means that that information reached every corner in the world. And phone contacts, and what I mean phone contacts means that now in my smartphone I have like dozens of contacts of very well-known journalists to whom I can be in touch in the future if we have something important to communicate. So always I think in terms of communication, this is not science, we all know that, but in terms of communication of science, it's simply priceless. Anything that does take home message can stick to this. So thank you very much for your attention.