When it comes to chemical reactions, if you can imagine it, somewhere out there a microbe is already doing it. This was something we used to say in graduate school. The challenge is finding that microbe among the billions that exist in environments all around us.
Surehka Karudapuram is the VP, Commercial Operations at Isolation Bio where they are helping researchers solve that needle in a haystack problem. In this episode we talked about the what, the how and the why.
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Isolation Bio specializes in high-throughput and automated isolation and cultivation of microbes. Surehka explains that Isolation Bio's platform consists of an instrument, consumables, and accessories that enable the efficient study of new microbes, their unique products, and their impact on the world.
One could isolate many different microbes by diluting and plating extracts from your environment of interest on petri plates and then waiting to see what grows. Isolation Bio's technology allows researchers to perform massively parallel cultivation of hundreds of bacteria from various samples, such as soil or feces. This takes place in an array with over 6,000 nanoscale wells. I found it amazing enough to sort microbes into the wells. What blew my mind was the ability to then pick the desired samples out of those wells and transfer them to 96- or 384-well plates for further analysis.
Incubating the array under specific conditions is the first step in screening for the type of bacteria you are looking for. In one example, the desired bacterium grew slowly and would typically be overtaken by other species. Creating individual isolates gave researchers the chance to find and cultivate exactly the species they were looking for.
Either way, I appreciate you spending time here.
Microbiome research has evolved from observation and cataloging into studying actual biology. We’ve gone from metagenomics (identifying what's there by next-gen sequencing) to identifying the capabilities of bacteria and purifying compounds. We discussed various application areas, including human health, animal health, agriculture, and environmental sciences, where microbiome research and bacteria play a crucial role.
Human health is a big area for our customers and the microbiome space and it's just so many kinds of diseases that are now being linked to the microbiome and then also getting to that point of that causation. I'll just use the example of drug response or immunotherapy response in cancer patients. There's a clear population difference between the responders and the non-responders.
And now we're starting to see work where the bacteria from the responders are being isolated and then being used in mouse models and then again, down to the next step, which is purifying, you know, maybe from the supernatant, the molecules, and then seeing that that can enhance immunotherapy drug response.
Getting back to “If you can imagine it…”, we discussed potential commercial applications of isolated bacteria, including the development of probiotics, therapeutics, and products for various industries. Surehka highlighted the possibility of bacteria as "chemical factories" that produce beneficial compounds and explained how synthetic biology can be applied to engineer bacteria for specific functions, such as producing biodegradable plastics.
It’s an exciting time to learn about the connection between our gut microbiome and other aspects of human health. On the other end of the spectrum is the possibility of discovering useful new compounds or ways of synthesizing them in living chemical factories. Where do you see the biggest potential?
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Mining the Microbiome for Possibilities