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Microbes in sentence

346 examples of Microbes in a sentence

The bottom line is that from their tiny-scale existence, these tiny microbes have a very large-scale power to control how our ocean smells, how it tastes, how it feels and how it looks.
If you take one idea away from my talk today, let it be this: we have an incredibly important relationship with these marine microbes that have very large-scale consequences, and we're just barely beginning to understand what that relationship looks like and how it may be changing.
Just as a physician will have trouble curing a disease of unknown cause, we will have similar trouble restoring ocean health without understanding the microbes better.
It turns out, we're not alone in having our own protective community of microbes.
I see the microbes on the coral reefs, both the good ones and the bad ones, trying to link their micro-scale behaviors to this big picture of: How do we help the reef that looks like the right back towards something that looks more like the left?
There's also some evidence that the healthy microbes on the coral can fight off the pathogen if the conditions are right.
I hope you've enjoyed this short journey into our microbial oceans and that the next time you look out at the sea, you'll take in a deep breath of fresh ocean air and wonder: What else are all of the unseen microbes doing to keep us and our oceans healthy?
And this is what I thought for a long period of time, and that's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit, the microbes that do bad things.
So, I went yesterday, I apologize, I skipped a few of the talks, and I went over to the National Academy of Sciences building, and they sell toys, giant microbes.
So, unfortunately or not surprisingly, most of the microbes they sell at the National Academy building are pathogens.
And it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes, and those microbes actually do us good much of the time, rather than killing us.
People have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us, I know you're not paying attention to me, but ... (Laughter) The microbes that cover us.
And if you look at them in the microscope, you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells.
There's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain.
It turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their DNA.
And that's what I've been doing for 20 years, using DNA sequencing, collecting samples from various places, including the human body, reading the DNA sequence and then using that DNA sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place.
And what's amazing, when you use this technology, for example, looking at humans, we're not just covered in a sea of microbes.
There are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us.
We have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us.
And so this microbial diversity differs between people, and what people have been thinking about in the last 10, maybe 15 years is, maybe these microbes, this microbial cloud in and on us, and the variation between us, may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us.
My first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that I gave, right around the corner from here at Georgetown.
And they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants.
And so I started a collaboration with this person, Michael Zasloff and Thomas Fishbein, to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient.
They take the donor ileum, which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community, say Crohn's disease, and they sterilized the donor ileum.
Cleaned out all the microbes, and then put it in the recipient.
They leave the microbes with the donor, and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant.
In the last few years there's been a great expansion in using DNA technology to study the microbes in and on people.
And when people have done a variety of studies, they have learned things such as, when a baby is born, during vaginal delivery you get colonized by the microbes from your mother.
And one area that I think is very interesting, which many of you may have now that we've thrown microbes into the crowd, is something that I would call "germophobia."
And killing pathogens is a good thing if you're sick, but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world, that we're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us.
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