We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide.

Well, that's just mercury and nitric acid.

At 11AM there is one bacterium.

The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri.

Once upon a time there's this happy little bacterium.

A strain of this bacterium was grown in space.

Is it bigger than the biggest bacterium? We don't know.

And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide.

Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium.

And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye.

What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure.

A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light.

A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it.

When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage.

These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.

The first time I ever heard of a lung specialist experimenting with cellulose and nitric acid.

And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide.

It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans.

If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare.

Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.

So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like,

This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence,

Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile.

And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released (Poof!) and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide nitrate, NO3 nitrite, NO2 nitrosothiols.

But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide.

They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA.

What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri.

We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things.

What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium a multi drug resistant pathogenic bacterium in the same time we give our anti quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives.

Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours.

This is one mechanism by which the bacterium Bacteroides fragilis prevents a mouse version of multiple sclerosis.

There are people who are mimicking the energy harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU.

So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, and it engulfs it and eats it.

And this is the mechanism by which the bacterium called Lactobacillus rhamnosus effects depressive like behavior in mice.

We think that the skin well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms.

What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule.

What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away.

So, by treating mice with this bacterium Bacteroides fragilis we're able to correct core abnormalities, such as the communication deficit that is depicted here.

We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin.

Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics?

First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism.

But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire.

If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter.

When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide.

So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation.