And Steve, I think you said before, one of the reasons you became a microbiologist is because you had this fascination with the Black Death and the plague. And so I'd read a bit about medieval medicine as part of that. Hers being a professional interest as a specialist in that area, and mine being a very passive interest as a microbiologist who also does some reenactments. We had been talking to Christina Lee, Ph.D., who was in the School of English at Nottingham, and we had this shared interest in the history of disease. The other project we started at that point, which was what became the AncientBiotics Consortium, was really a complete accident. For me, that was where I learned to be a proper microbiologist. ![]() And I think that that kind of crystallized everything. And so, when the job with Steve came up, it just looked perfect. I was still sort of deciding whether I was going to be a microbiologist or an evolutionary biologist. Harrison: I think that Job was kind of pivotal in my career direction. And so she joined us at Nottingham, which was great. And then then I had a postdoc job that came up, and I was very, very happy that she actually applied for it. And that's kind of how I started my own group, I guess.Īnd at the same time, Freya, was working as a Ph.D., I think she was doing a Ph.D. And as I was getting to the end of my postdoc, having studied mechanisms of quorum sensing, I was kind of thinking, ‘Well, what am I going to do in the future?’ And I ended up kind of bumping into and meeting some evolutionary biologists, who are now at the University of Oxford, who started asking questions that we'd never really thought about, you know-they were more why questions? Not how does quorum sensing work? Why is it there, and what survival value does it give to the bacteria? And through that, we started asking some more evolutionary questions about quorum sensing. in quorum sensing in Nottingham, the University of Nottingham in the U.K. They are also working to pull out the active compounds from Bald’s eyesalve and make a synthetic cocktail that could be added to a wound dressings.įeatured Quotes: Diggle: I'm a molecular biologist by trade.The group recently published work showing synergistic antimicrobial effects of acetic acid and honey.The goal? To mathematically data mine these recipes see which ingredients were very often or non-randomly combined in ancient medical remedies. ![]() Together, the researchers began scouring early modern and medieval texts and turning them into databases.Erin Connelly from the University of Warwick). The group brought data scientists and mathematicians into the consortium (work driven by Dr. ![]() The consortium found that the eyesalve was capable of killing MRSA, a discovery that generated a lot of media attention and sparked expanded research efforts.The group’s first undertaking was recreation and investigation of the antimicrobial properties of an ancient eyesalve described in Bald’s Leechbook, one of the earliest known medical textbooks, which contains recipes for medications, salves and treatments.The AncientBiotics Consortium is a group of experts from the sciences, arts and humanities, who are digging through medieval medical books in hopes of finding ancient solutions to today’s growing threat of antibiotic resistance.When Diggle began searching for a postdoc, Harrison, who had been conducting an independent fellowship at Oxford and studying social evolution, applied.and Diggle was doing background research for his work studying evolutionary questions about quorum sensing. ![]()
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