Episode Info

(Micro) Biologist | Eco Warrior | Change Agent 

(Micro) Biologist Simran is a Ph.D student studying Micro Biology specifically yeast as part of her Ph.D thesis. She is interested to know how micro-organisms can help humanity tackle the worlds impending problems like plastic and climate change. 

When she is not trying to hypnotise yeast cells to do something they aren’t really happy doing, Simran is teaching children how to code with cute robots. Now, talk about science for good! 

Here we go with the episode:

Warning – This episode is highly technical and sciency. If you are curious about how the world works, you would mostly likely really be hooked on to the show. 🙂  

Below is the excerpts of un-edited auto-transcribed version of the episode:

Naga Subramanya B B 3:51
I wanted to get your take on what’s happening in the world currently with the with the corona virus and why it’s spreading. What’s a virus Why is it such like a big Enigma and what’s happening with the corona virus?

Simran Aulakh 4:04
So let’s see. So virus is like a really really tiny particle that is kind of at the edge of living. Because it cannot really replicate. You know, you will define life perhaps, like in textbooks, quite often defined as that which replicates itself right. The virus cannot really replicate itself outside of host that’s a complete parasite, it needs something else to, to grow into divide and so on. And the other thing is, it’s a very, very minimalist kind of form of life. The only thing it really has is some nucleic acids or some RNA or DNA. The Corona virus, for example, is an RNA virus. So it has a little piece of what is called ribonucleic acid, and then it has a bunch of proteins around it. And sometimes these viruses also have some limits around them. The ones that infect, like humans or other viruses infect everything, by the way, like there’s even viruses that attack bacteria. The fact that you can have like viruses infecting bacteria to have new type of antibacterial things as well. So yeah, the corona virus has jumped from, you know, other animals to us from a bat.

And so, yeah, I don’t know, I’m, let’s see what happens. Right now. There’s no known vaccine or any preventive drug or any drug once you got infected with the corona virus, which is why it’s so scary. And since it’s transmitted through people, to people to where as all the things that it can spread quite fast. And yeah, that that’s why everyone’s panicking a bit. But let’s hope ideally, someone would discover it right for very quickly.

Naga Subramanya B B 5:52
Yeah, I’ve always felt that viruses are more more mysterious than the other microorganisms. What sets them apart?

Simran Aulakh 6:01
I personally think you could die of bacteria or fungi or many other things. I suppose viruses can be spread quite rapidly. Some of them give you quite fast. I think the really big thing is that in terms of how many antiviral therapies, we have very few very hard to kill the virus and once it inside your body, you know, on the surface, you can sterilize like operation theatres, other things, you can sterilize pieces of equipment more easily, but once it’s in you, it’s very hard to kill it. And part of the reason is that viral I get it exists inside yourself. So when a virus has infected you, it means that it’s not just some bacteria or most bacteria or somewhere you know, either on the surface of your body or within your tissues in between some cells but viruses are, like always interesting. So they’ve gone through the membrane of your cell and gone inside. Either they’ve integrated their genome or their piece of DNA into your DNA. So it’s very hard to kind of kill them at this point.

They’re very much part of your body. The virus is basically just a piece of DNA surrounded by some proteins or others. And what it does is that when it attacks a host, it doesn’t have you know, it can’t generate energy on its own, it can’t do anything on its own. It has it needs a host cell that goes into the host cell. And then using this piece of DNA, it uses the host machinery, so everything that the cell that’s being attacked, uses to build proteins, DNA, to get energy that hijacks all of that machinery, and just makes more of itself rather than letting the horse so kind of do its own job.

If you would like to read entire transcript, check out the episode in medium article here.