"My name is Amy Jacobson.
I'm a third year graduate student at UCSF at the Mission Bay campus here.
I study the interaction of the bacteria that live in the human gut with the immune system.
We hope that this may have applications to treat inflammatory bowel diseases.
I have my degrees in chemistry so I'm interested in molecules.
I do genetics in this one particular bacterium to try to change the structure of this molecule
to then change the way that the immune system reacts to that bacterium.
When I was little I really wanted to be a veterinarian so people told me ""If you want
to be a veterinarian you have to be really good at science."" In seventh grade, I think,
I remember I started to really pay attention to my science classes.
I'd been really good at math before then so I was like ""OK, I've got to really focus
on science if I want to be a veterinarian.""
Then at some point, I think really early on in high school I worked for, I think I last
about three hours, at a veterinary clinic before I almost passed out when they had to
cut a mole off of a dog.
It just wasn't going to work for me.
But I still really loved the science classes and math classes so I kept at it in high school.
I took an advanced placement chemistry course and it was the hardest class that I'd ever
taken.
I actually probably did the worst in that class that I did in any of my other classes
in high school.
But it just sort of made me pay more attention to it.
It made me fight with the subject and just sort of take notice of the subject material
a lot more.
When I went to college I decided that I wanted to stick with that subject even though it
was really, really difficult for me.
As soon as I got into a lab in college where I was able to actually not just be doing problem
sets and homework and reading textbooks, but actually getting in and doing the science
that was something that I definitely wanted to keep doing.
The best way to do that was come to graduate school and then, hopefully, be able to continue
on afterwards.
The very basic question that I'm asking is what's going on in a normal case.
So in just a person walking around who is not dizzy in any way or doesn't have anything
wrong with them what is their normal interaction with their bacteria.
More and more as we learn about these inflammatory bowel diseases, which would be like Crohn's
Disease or Ulcerative Colitis.
These diseases, they don't have cures because we don't really understand why they happen
in the first place.
So there's a lot of people doing research on trying to figure out what's going on.
It seems like some part of it is people can have genetic mutations so you might not be
the same as the person standing next to you genetically.
That may factor into whether you get an inflammatory bowel disease.
But also which bacteria are living in your gut seems to also be very influential.
Can we control the bacteria that are living in your gut?
So potentially, if you don't have inflammatory bowel disease, but the person next to you
does, could we learn something...
Could we maybe fix their problem by making their gut bacteria community look more like
yours.
Generally every day I come in and I do what we call cloning.
Or, if you want to be fancy, molecular biology.
But, I guess cloning - most people think of cloning an organism or making an exact copy.
But when we say cloning it's just manipulating DNA.
I work with this bacterium called Bacteroides Thetaiotaomicron, which we call Theta, because
that's a mouthful.
I work with this organism and I'm trying to change the structure of a molecule.
But you can do that chemically.
You could actually make a molecule with a whole bunch of synthetic tools and you could
do bunch of synthetic reactions and build this really complicated molecule.
But essentially that would take me a lot longer than just trying to get the bacteria to do
the chemistry for me and make a bunch of this molecule and then I can just grow up a whole
bunch of the bacteria and then purify the molecule out of it.
The other thing that I work on is putting in a protein from a different bacterium that
does a different function to the same molecule.
Something that the original bacterium was never able to do.
I can take a protein from a different organism and I can put it into my bacteria that I work
with and make it do that function on my molecule.
That's all done by just transferring DNA from one organism to another.
That's where the bacterial strains that I'm making, the ones that have different versions
of this molecule could come into play.
So potentially, we hope that one of the strains that I'm making could be eventually used to
colonize a person with inflammatory bowel disease and just calm down the level of disease
that they're seeing and allow your good bacteria to take back over the community instead of
the shifted strange, bad bacteria.
There are all of these tools that we use every day just without really paying much attention
to them.
It must have taken people decades to figure some of this stuff out that we're able to
take advantage of.
Then you're think ""Well, maybe I'm developing something that 50 years from now - is just
going to be standard protocol that everybody's using."" That's pretty exciting."