 What piece of microbiological knowledge should the whole world know, should everybody in the world know about? I would say wash your hands and be careful in your food preparation. Okay, so very practical advice. I would say it's the fact that not all organisms are pathogenic, but for the pathogens I think one of the most important things for people to know is about antimicrobial resistance, which is very important. So when that knowledge is gained you can question or ask the rationale from your general practitioner for example why you've been given antibiotics and that will help everyone to better use antibiotics and probably that will reverse the current trend of antimicrobial resistance. So I guess some of the problem is that people don't know that there's a problem and it's that sort of previous step of making sure they know about the problem so that they can then think about how to fix the problem that is the thing. I agree with that and there was a session today about the One Health approach and I like the punchline which I tweeted which is how, why and when to use antibiotics is the real issue and people need to just know how, when and why so that when they know they can ask questions and when questions are asked people tend to adjust their behaviour to do the right things basically. Okay, Jay's a behaviour around it as well. What one piece of microbiological knowledge do you think that everybody in the world should know about? It kind of goes along with the first answer like bacteria are bloody awesome, they can survive anywhere whether it's cold, whether it's too hot, whether it's toxins around or radioactivity, they can just do anything. The diverse hardiness of them, yeah okay. I find that truly amazing, yes. And it is amazing, yeah. Again I'd like to be greedy if I may and first of all, in terms of medical microbiology I would say the world has been changed by us adopting and using wisely vaccines, long may that continue and in terms of environmental microbiology if I might, the biggest change that we could make globally for the well-being of all societies and for economic development would be clean drinking water. It is simple, it's achievable, do we choose to do that globally? And Hilou? They're great answers, I'm a bit jealous now. I think I would say that remind people or if they're not aware that micro-organisms, single-celled life forms, first life forms on planet Earth, three and a half billion years ago and from them and from their growth they shaped the entire planet and made it inhabitable with the rest of us and they continue to be essential for every aspect of our daily lives. I guess that unbroken chain of replication all the way back to that first single-celled organism leads to everyone in the world so it's a good thing to know about. Isn't it just mind-blowing actually? Yeah, fantastic. Well I think what everyone knows about is the fact that bacteria can cause disease and that antibiotic resistance is a real problem and there may be some populist dictators somewhere that don't believe that indiscriminate antibiotic use is causing problems but antibiotic resistance is a huge problem particularly for aging populations in the developing world because bacterial infections are not going to go away and sadly there's been very little development of new antibiotics or new antimicrobials in the last 30 years. So I think most people that read newspapers are aware of this problem. Okay, but hopefully we should make sure that everyone knows it. Yes. Okay. What is the one piece of microbiological knowledge you think everyone in the world should know about? Well that's a very good question and I think it's something I've been reflecting a lot and I think that should be that we all came from microbes. So what we know usually about evolution, what everyone knows, it's as if my favorite comedian said, you know, if you have to tell people about evolution you're being a bit boring. You're saying, yeah, well basically there was a big bang and then we all came from monkeys. Straight up. Yeah. But I think if you tell people that we all came from microbes that puts both microbiology and evolution and the whole natural world at different perspectives, it makes people understand and try to think, but what is the similarities between microbes and us? What was between the microbes and us and you know, everything, ecology of microbes also whether they are friends or enemies and what are the similarities between us and them and how can we manage them? Everybody in the world, I would use microbes to illustrate evolution as the most successful process in probably in the universe. Just life on earth as it is is almost four billion years old. So we have a process based on the principle of evolution that is practically immortal. The products are ephemeral, but the process is so robust that it is practically immortal. Four billion years. Yes, exactly. And we know that when the life started, when we have last universal common ancestor that it looked very similar to a bacterium and it was a single celled organism that reproduced its genetic and therefore functional information and that's how the life started to grow like. And eventually became all of us as well, you know, eventually reproducing every human alive today, which is amazing. Yes. Absolutely. That we have a uninterrupted tree of life over four billion years starting with something like bacterium and to the people like you and me talking now. Everyone should know that there are more microorganisms and on earth are stars in the universe. They are trillion of millions species in the world and only one. Those are numbers that I cannot pronounce, but it's one to the ten to the thirty number of microorganisms on earth and there's one to the ten to the twenty one stars in the universe. Wow, okay. So that can give you an idea of the diversity of the microorganisms and the important roles that they are playing in the environment. Well, so they outnumber the stars, they outnumber all of us. They are bigger than everything. Yeah, and they are more diverse and we only know 99% of all the microorganisms are not no. We don't know what they are doing in the environment. So we just know that there's so much we have no idea about. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. Fantastic. Yeah. Wow. That's a good question. Microbe never die. They never die. Because they can divide and they can survive and also they can enjoy such a huge diversity among us in nature and sometimes they can get to be an enemy to each other, but they can cooperate as well. Okay. So there's kind of no sharing about the diversity and also they're helping each other and also sometimes we can have a conflict. However, they have the good reason to solve all the problems. So I think we should learn a lot from those microbiological societies are not anything that people know much about outside of science, are they? They talk to each other, they have a community. They have little wars and factions, but they do end up solving many of their problems very efficiently. Yeah. And I could say not only amongst the microbes, but also with the other organisms also. Like you can look at ourselves. So actually we are living together with a lot of microbes inside as well as on the surface as well. So I think without them, we cannot survive probably. So I think from this sense, I think only people would understand how microbes are fascinating for work with them. So we need them more than they need us. Yeah. We are helped for a long time and probably we will. So yeah, sometimes they can be harmful, but if we can make it a control, I think we can have a good harmony altogether. Yeah, a wonderful, harmonious relationship with the microbes in us and around us. I think everybody should know the role of microbial communities in our daily life because, okay, now we are getting aware of the role of the gut microbiota, but people that are not familiar with microbiology in these years is getting more confident with the idea of having a gut microbiota functionally developed, et cetera. And so I think this concept is already getting to the people, but I think that in general people should know that there are also other systems that are directly related to their life. And these are, for example, plant microbiome interactions, so microbiota living with crops, for example. And with our food source and around their roots. Exactly. So everything we eat is strictly related to microbial life, so I think this should be important. That's a good one. Whenever I give a talk to kids, I always make sure they know that antibiotics are running out and that we really need to be careful with using them. So I guess to make sure everybody is aware that antibiotics are just for bacteria and not for viruses, and that you need to make sure you follow the doctor's advice to them and we don't run out because then we're going to be in big trouble. Yeah, because we need those antibiotics, don't we? Exactly. And you give talks to children, then, about science? Yeah, I've done a couple of outreach talks with Surinperial to school kids, which has been quite fun. So what ages? Young or old ages? Yeah, I've done one for six farmers, which is good, and then I did one a couple of months ago for, I think, year five, year six, so 10 year olds, and they loved it. I had all of their hands went up at the end. Wonderful. Tons of questions. Yeah, they're all fascinated by the bacteria. Lovely. Now, that's an interesting and difficult question. I think if I had to pick up one answer and one concept, it's the fact that microbes are everywhere. They're in us, they're in animals, they're in plants, they're in roots, they're in the soil, they're in oceans. We don't notice them because we usually don't see them for good reasons, but I think that people should take into account the fact that microbes are essential parts of ecosystems and they are suffering as much as the rest of living creatures from the bad evolution, pollution, global warming, pollution, antibiotics spread in the environments, and I think we are just starting to see the downsides of altering the microbial populations in ecosystems, and that's going to be more and more visible, unfortunately, if we don't do anything. So I think it's an emergency as much as any global warming and other ecological issue at the moment. The vision of microbes, wherever you go in Europe, in Africa, people think microbes are bad things, they cause diseases. So I think we have to revert this and make people understand that microbes are essential. I mean, they were here before us, they will be here after us, and they are essential elements of ecosystems. Well, I guess I've done a lot of teaching and a lot of interacting with lay folks, and I think it's probably better known now than it was a few years ago, but for many people, the only thing they knew was that bacteria made you sick and you took an antibiotic and killed them and they went away. They had no sense of how many bacteria we have in our intestine, what an astonishing number that we're covered with bacteria that they're absolutely everywhere. The microbiome is an influence on all kinds of factors of health. And I think that part of it is now better understood now, but I think there are many people, the world I live in is probably heavily still populated by people who have some amount of education. I think there are a lot of people who don't understand there's this unseed world out there. And the other thing for me that was important, I think, was that that's so much of evolution happened at the level of bacteria there, first life 3.8 billion years ago, and eukaryotes didn't come around for a long time, so it's not surprising that amino acid biosynthesis and principles of DNA replication and translation and ribosomes and everything were all worked out in bacteria. And I found it fascinating that, especially in the earlier parts of my career, things like DNA repair and stuff like that, that the counterparts were either there directly as homologs in mammalian eukaryotic cells, or they was convergent evolution and come to the same solution, but using a different protein or something, that the power of the bacterium is a model for other things. And both Miro and I did work with mismatch repair. I sort of got mutants in MUDES and MUDEL, which are key components of the post-replicative mismatch repair system that improves fidelity after DNA replication. And when I cloned them, I tried to publish it back to back. I contacted a group who I thought had the same gene, it was called HEXA, but from streptococcinemoniae, we could see there were homologs, and I tried to publish it, I think, in PNAS, and the reviewers said this was of absolutely no interest, it should go in a specialty journal, so we published it in Journal of Bacteriology. The sequence came out and my phone started to ring by people who were calling me to tell me that mammalian cells had a MUDES homolog. Ironically, one of them was located, I think, on the other side, right beside dihydrofolate reductase, and in the old days, we didn't know so much about DNA, so they'd sequenced in the wrong direction initially, and they had an orph of unknown function. And since then, people went on within about a year or less than two years, people had understood that hereditary non-polyposis colon cancer, which is now known as Lynch syndrome, or the familial susceptibility to colon, probably ovarian cancer, comes about, in some cases, by defects in the mismatch or parasystem, and you accumulate mutations at a much higher rate. And that was the case where the work in bacteria directly informed our understanding of humans. So that was the other aspect, microbes as microbes and their role in that, but also microbes as model systems to understand what happened in evolution and gaining insights into humans, too.