On the road again — Superbugs in Caerphilly
We recently held a fun workshop for the fantastic year 5 class of Mrs Jenkins and Mr Bowen at Hendredenny Park Primary in Caerphilly.
We set up our camp in the school’s assembly hall where we offered a whole range of activities - a ‘Grow your own Microbe’ station, a handwashing station using magic lotion that glows under UV light, microscopes showing bacterial and fungal organisms, and a tin can alley demonstrating what happens when microbes become resistant to antibiotics.
These activities were complemented by displays of agar plates with bacteria and moulds, fluffy giant microbes showing the variety of the tiny creatures around us, mannequins dressed up as ‘Typhoid Mary’ and a medieval plague doctor — and Steve, our very own skeleton. Posters and infoboards gave some background about diseases and vaccines.
A few days later, we were back for a second visit showing the body swabs and environmental samples (and awarding a special prize for the yuckiest plate) we had grown in the lab, for a Q&A session with our scientists, and testing which group of pupils could correctly answer our quiz based on our activities and win some prizes!
Thanks so much to Mrs Jenkins and Mr Bowen for hosting us, and to everyone in year 5 for making this such an enjoyable visit!
General science
Before our visit, each pupil prepared a question for us — about science in general, about what it’s like to work as a scientist, and about how we became scientists. Below we are listing some of these questions and our answers.
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Microbes are tiny living things that live all over and even inside our bodies. Many of them are helpful — they live in our gut to help digest food and make vitamins, protect our skin from harmful germs and train our immune system to fight diseases. Some microbes can even be used to make medicines like antibiotics and vaccines. So, while some microbes can make us sick, most of them keep us healthy and help our bodies work properly.
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We don’t know the exact number, but some scientists believe there could be millions of different types of microbes in the world. Only a small number have been discovered, studied and given names. Most microbes are too tiny and live in places we don’t normally explore, like deep in the ocean, in soil or at the South Pole — or even inside our own bodies. This means there are still many, many microbes waiting to be discovered!
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The most common infectious disease in the world is probably the common cold (I guess this is why it’s called the common cold). It’s caused by viruses, especially rhinoviruses, which spread through the air when people cough, sneeze or touch things with the virus on them. Almost everyone gets colds, often more than once a year, which makes it the most widespread illness on the planet. In most cases it’s not really serious, you just feel ill for a few days and may miss a couple of days of school before you get better again.
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Scientists discover new microbes by collecting samples from different places like soil, water, air, or even from inside animals and humans. Then they try to grow the microbes in a lab using special food called culture media to help the microbes multiply so they can be studied. Scientists can then look at them under a microscope to see their shape and size, study which kind of food they need to live, and even use DNA testing to check if the microbe is something completely new or already known. When scientist discover a new species, they can choose a name for it.
Did you know there are organisms named after SpongeBob SquarePants (Spongiforma squarepantsii, a fungus), Beyoncé (Scaptia beyonceae, a type of horse fly), Lady Gaga (Gaga Germanotta, a species of fern) and Donald Trump (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a moth)? No joke!
And then there’s Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis, a slimy bacterium named after the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll in North Wales, where it was discovered — this is officially the longest name of any living or fossil organism in the world!
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The first antibiotic discovered was penicillin. It was found in 1928 by a scientist named Alexander Fleming when he noticed that a type of mould stopped bacteria from growing. The most amazing thing is that he discovered penicillin completely by accident! He was working in his lab in London when he noticed that one of his petri dishes, which had been left out by mistake, had grown mould. But instead of just throwing the messy plate away and thinking that his experiment had failed, Fleming got very curious! What caught his attention was that no bacteria were growing around the mould — it looked like a clear circle where the germs had been killed. He realised that the mould released a substance that could kill harmful bacteria. And because the mould was called Penicillium, substance became known as ‘penicillin’. It later saved millions of lives by helping doctors treat infections that were once deadly. His discovery showed how careful observation and curiosity can lead to amazing breakthroughs in science!
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Many people think science is just a bunch of fixed facts or that it always gives a clear answer right away. But science is really about investigating, testing ideas and sometimes being wrong before getting it right. Like when we learned about microbes and hygiene, scientists have to do experiments and update their ideas as they discover more. Science is a process of learning and improving, not just memorising answers.
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Yes! Bacteria and viruses can land on fungi, and sometimes they even interact with them in interesting ways. Some bacteria actually live on or inside fungi, helping them get nutrients or even protecting them from other microbes. Other bacteria might just stick to the surface without causing harm. And there are viruses called mycoviruses that infect fungi. They live inside fungal cells and can sometimes change how the fungus grows or spreads. So fungi aren’t just living on their own — they can be a tiny ecosystem where bacteria and viruses hang out too. It’s like a little microscopic city!
Being a Scientist
The questions below were about personal experiences so we have indicated who actually answered them — Superbugs co-lead Matthias or our internship students Lila and Gina!
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(Matthias) As an immunologist who studies people’s immune system and how their body responds to infection, I don’t really work on microbes in the lab (this is more what Jon does as a microbiologist). So I haven’t really come across microbes that you would possibly class as ‘deadly’, like the plague, cholera or other really nasty diseases from the past. But we do study patients who’ve been hospitalised with serious infections, in their blood, in their urine, in their brains or in their bellies. Many of these patients need special care in what we call the ‘intensive care unit’ of the hospital, and unfortunately some of them die from their infections because all the care and medicine they receive is still not enough. So, in this respect, I come across deadly microbes all the time — microbes that sadly kill some of our patients.
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(Matthias) I assume you mean ‘rare’ as in ‘weird’ or ‘strange’? I’ve read about many strange microbes and learned about them during my work as a scientist — like bacteria that survive near deep sea volcanoes in boiling hot water, bacteria that are so large that you can see them with your naked eye, and bacteria that can eat plastic. But if you mean ‘rare’ as in ‘seldom found’ that would be bacteria that I created myself in the lab — bacteria that nobody else has ever seen, only me! In order to study certain parts of microbes in more detail, scientists sometimes need to produce those structures in larger quantities to have enough material for their experiments. And the best way to do this is to put (‘clone’) the genetic information (DNA) for those parts into E. coli bacteria so that those E. coli cells then produce the new material. It’s a bit like installing a new app in E. coli that makes them do new things!
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(Matthias) What I’ve always found most interesting in biology are parasites – tiny creatures that live inside us and feed on our blood or our organs. Quite disgusting things actually! This started early at university when I learned about the lancet liver fluke, a little worm that lives in sheep. The larvae of this parasite infect small snails that feed on sheep poop; a second generation of larvae is then excreted with the snail slime and infects ants. Inside the ant, the parasite larvae do something truly amazing. Namely, they reprogramme the ant's brain so that instead of seeking shelter and returning to their ant nest for the night (like what a normal ant would want to do), the infected ants climb up a blade of grass and wait to be eaten by sheep. Inside the sheep, the larvae mature into adult worms and start laying eggs again. This is what we call a ‘life cycle’. I was hooked by this story and decided to study infections and how our body fights them for the rest of my life!
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(Matthias) Yes, we’ve been to a few other schools in the past and provided similar activities. Not as many as we would like to, mainly because we’re so busy with our ‘normal’ sciency jobs as researchers and teaching students! But we always enjoy having the chance to visit schools, talking about microbes and answering questions. We always hope that each pupil (and their teachers) finds at least some part of our visit interesting, and that it triggers their curiosity and invites them to think about science, health and the world around them. Not everyone needs to become a scientist — but everyone needs to understand a bit of science, for instance why we get sick and how we can fight infections with antibiotics and vaccines.
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(Lila) Not until I was about 13 or 14 years old. I used to love art and maths, and I think that looking through microscopes to see microbes sometimes looks like a pretty painting. I only started to love science (specifically biology) in secondary school, as we got to use much cooler equipment like Bunsen burners and microscopes. I think if you’ve the curiosity to learn about the world, science will be your answer! But you don’t need to be sure right now, just be sure you’re learning and doing something you enjoy!
(Gina) For me, yes! When I was about 6-7 years old I wanted to be an “entomologist” (a person who studies insects). I had my own butterfly net and a bug hunting kit to see what I could find and identify. Now that I’m at university, the bugs I look for are so small you need a microscope to see them!
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(Lila) My current research will go towards helping develop treatments for people with viral infections. As you cannot use antibiotics for viruses, they’re often a lot harder to treat. I think it is important to support hospitals and patients through research, to make them feel better and to help other scientists discover new things too!
(Matthias) My research is about finding out what happens very early on during an infection, at the site of infection. Which sounds simple but is really difficult to do! We’re studying very unwell patients with severe infections who need urgent care and medicine, and the earlier we find out what’s wrong with them and how best to help them, the better. Ideally, this research will help us understand why these patients feel unwell and lead to better tests for people at risk of life-threatening problems.
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(Matthias) Yes, I’ve used microscopes many times – as s student when I learned about cells and tissues, both in plants and animals, and then later for my daily research. In our lab we study the immune cells that are in our blood, and when we use them for experiments we count them under the microscope so that we always use the exact same number for our experiments. That way we can check if they’re happy in our culture plates and if they respond to microbes if we add them. In a way, immunology is the science of really cool, multicolour microscopy. For some experiments, we stain the different cells of the immune system in many different colours, to study how they interact with each other. Under a normal microscope they all look the same, just like tiny white balls (quite boring actually), but under our magic microscope each different type of immune cell lights up in a different colour that glows in the dark, using a very special microscope that contains lasers (yep, just like the ones in Star Wars). This allows us to find out how the immune systems works – and at the same time we produce some really beautiful images!
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(Matthias) I don’t know if this counts as ‘weird’ but I was part of a team that discovered a completely new compound that is produced by many different microbes but not by others! We managed to isolate enough of this molecule to study it properly and realised that it had never been seen before — a true discovery of something completely novel! With this we didn’t just find a new way how those microbes convert food into important structures that they need to survive. We also realised that this molecule is detected by the immune system of our body and allows us to respond to all those organisms that produce it. The immune cells that do recognise the new compound are very rare and not many other people in the world study them. I’ve been trying for the past 25 years to understand what these cells do and how we can use them for new tests and possibly new vaccines, and after all this time we still discover new things about them!
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(Matthias) I’m answering these four questions together as they’re all related. In secondary school I started to become more and more interested in science, first in chemistry and then in biology. But I also liked things like maths and music, so it was always difficult to choose! And in fact, I never had a good biology teacher, especially the last one at the time of my A levels was pretty horrible — but if you really like something don’t let anyone discourage you! So I decided to study biology at university and started to think about doing research — first related to genes and DNA, then later I fell in love with infections. From the age of 23 I then worked in different labs and learned many different methods and ways to do experiments, and I met amazing people from all over the world. I think I became a proper scientist the moment I was in a lab and did my first actual experiment, before I was just someone who had read a lot about science. Actually doing it with your own hands is what makes you a scientist! I’ve now been doing lab research for just over 30 years and still enjoy my work. Every day is different! And just to mention that if you want to become a research scientist and design your own projects you do need a university degree; but there are other non-university careers where you may work in a scientific lab helping others do their experiments.
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(Matthias) I think I’ve at least two favourite things. In a way I’m my own boss and can decide myself what I want to study in the lab, and how. I just do what I’m interested in — and the outcome can be quite unpredictable. You may suddenly discover something unexpected and then decide to find out even more, so you somehow follow where the science takes you, which can be in a completely new direction. The other thing I really enjoy is that science is team work, scientists almost never work on their own. You’re usually together with many other people, with different ideas and interests, and you constantly talk about science (and many other things), and learn from each other. Science is very international and you get to meet some pretty clever people from all over the world, and even become friends with them.
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(Matthias) I’m not sure what you mean with ‘project’ — for us a project is usually a certain way of studying something, which can take up to several years. One of my favourite projects is actually ‘Superbugs’! I’m normally a lab scientist and spend most of my time talking to other scientists around me. But I’ve found that it’s really important to also talk to ‘normal’ (non-scientific) people to make sure they understand what we work on, and why. This is particularly important when talking about infections and explaining how to protect ourselves from harmful microbes. For us scientists this may be obvious but we need to share our knowledge with everyone so that they can benefit from our research. For instance, it’s not enough to just develop new vaccines that prevent nasty illnesses like measles, polio or COVID-19. We also have to make sure that people actually want to take them! Because of this we try to explain to people how vaccines work and why it’s a good idea to take them, and answer any questions people may have about vaccines.
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(Gina) I’m still a student so my day is often full of lecture notes and studying for exams. This year I’m away from classes and gaining experience in a professional laboratory, helping other scientists with their projects and applying what I learned in lessons. I’m learning the practical skills I’ll need for a career in science after I graduate!
(Matthias) Every day’s different for me. I always start with coffee and check emails, even the boring admin ones. Being a senior scientist involves a lot of non-scientific stuff! In the lab, I may supervise lab members, help them understand their latest results, and design new experiments with them. I may teach university students or talk with other scientists about new ideas. I spend quite a lot of time writing research plans and papers that summarise our findings, and sometimes I travel to conferences in the UK or abroad to share our discoveries with experts in the field. I also read about the work others have done to stay on top of the latest scientific developments. And sometimes I do the really fun bits and visit a school like yours or go to a public space like the shopping centre in Cardiff to explain our research! The best part is celebrating our successes, like when a student passes their PhD or when the team makes a scientific breakthrough!
