babies usually don't get kidney stones
in 2008 16 kids in one chinese province
did and it was a sign that something was
really wrong a milk supplier for infant
formula played a very dangerous game
they watered down the milk to make more
profit to get the diluted milk to pass
the quality and safety tests they added
melamine but melamine is not a food
ingredient melamine is a chemical used
to make plastic countertops used to make
flooring used to make fertilizers it has
no place in food this dangerous practice
is called food adulteration the
perpetrators thought no one would notice
but they were dead wrong 6 infants died
50,000 babies were hospitalized 300,000
kids got sick if you think it can't
happen here
think again our food supply is global
what if there had been a way to know
that something was wrong with the milk
without knowing exactly what to look for
what if food could talk what if food is
talking right now and we just need to
learn how to listen I think the food is
talking through the harmless microbes
that live on food and they could have a
lot to tell us about the quality and the
safety of the things that we eat I know
that food safety is a multi-dimensional
problem but as an engineer and as a
parent I believe that strong detection
technology and specifically decoding the
food microbiome could be a way to
prevent the next food adulteration
scandal so what's the microbiome a
microbiome is a community of microbes
often living in harmony with a host like
a person and far from being a nuisance
microbiome has played key roles in the
health of people plants and animals your
microbiome is your normal flora and it
makes you stronger now I'm suggesting we
can use microbes to get in from
and this is just the next chapter in a
long history of people using microbes to
do useful stuff for us people have been
brewing beer since the dawn of wheeled
transportation 3500 BC so from then all
the way up until the 1970s we developed
a new capability biotech is about using
microbes to manufacture chemicals like
insulin and now today we're taking
biotech into a digital era where we use
microbes to get information and this
enables a radical idea why not use the
food microbiome as a natural built-in
sensor to tell us when food is unsafe
DNA sequencing is how this is happening
and using DNA sequencing we can tap into
the collective intelligence of microbes
as they go about their daily business
just sensing and responding to the
environment let me show you a microbiome
is a community of microbes and from
their DNA researchers can identify and
count them the relative abundance of the
microbes in the community depends at
least partially on nutrients and
chemicals in the environment a change in
the environment can cause a change in
the community whereby some microbes are
happier and some are less satisfied if
anything in the environment a chemical a
nutrient a new organism causes the
microbiome to rebalance itself then we
can detect that rebalancing in the DNA
if we have a baseline DNA measurement we
can detect a change from baseline now
the DNA tells us not only the identities
of these microbes it tells us what
they're doing by virtue of their genes
let me give you an example heavy metals
like mercury and lead are chemicals and
soil and water they occur naturally and
they also incur from industrial
pollution they're absorbed by plants and
animals and they accumulate as you go up
the food chain chronic exposure to even
low levels causes neurological deficits
some forms of cancer so guess what heavy
metals are hazardous to microbes but
intriguingly some microbes evolved
mechanisms to tolerate them including a
of pumps that export the metals from the
cell like a bouncer at the bar
if they can't accumulate inside they
can't cause damage so we asked the
question how many genes for heavy metals
pumps do microbiomes typically have we
counted these genes in thousands of
microbiome sampled from many types of
habitats including animal habitats human
soil and water habitats each data point
is an entire microbiome large values on
the vertical mean that the microbiome
has many genes for heavy metals pumps
and this happens when a microbe with a
lot of these genes makes up a large
fraction of its community now counting
the genes that confer heavy metals
tolerance is like listening for a DNA
echo of the heavy metals in the
environment this is just one of many
abilities that microbes can perform and
that we can profile so we can do this
exercise for many more abilities and
build up a fingerprint for each
microbiome the fingerprint tells if the
microbiome is the same or different from
baseline with respect to what it can do
so for example if a microbiome
fingerprint changes with respect to key
indicators associated with soil
chemistry then one might infer that a
crop was grown in a different geography
than before you tell me this rice is
from India but it's microbiome looks a
lot more like rice from Pakistan that's
the kind of insight into supply chains
that could be possible with a microbiome
fingerprint of food translating the
microbiome into food safety is very
early-stage research but even so right
now we can use our current knowledge of
biology with pattern recognition
algorithms to determine when a
microbiome is the same or different from
a baseline now had a microbiome test for
milk existed in 2008 it could have
raised a red flag if the melamine
happened to kick the microbial community
out of balance then that could have been
detected this one is different this
one's not like all the others wake up
pay attention wherever our understanding
of the microbiome takes us one
thing is certain humanity is once again
redefining its relationship with
microbes we are entering a digital age
for biotech where we use microbes to
gather information create knowledge and
make better decisions the microbes on
food are talking let's listen to them
thank you