Episode 89: Exploring How Microorganisms Shape Human Health

Professor James A. Scott takes us on a mind-expanding journey through the invisible world of microorganisms that profoundly shape our health from birth through adulthood. As an expert from the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health specializing in biological hazards, Scott reveals how the first 100 days of a baby's life represent a critical window when their gut microbiome—the complex community of bacteria living in our digestive systems—establishes itself and essentially "trains" their immune system.

The conversation challenges much of what we thought we knew about cleanliness and health. Scott explains how our modern obsession with sterilizing environments may actually contribute to rising rates of allergies and asthma. Surprisingly, exposures to certain microbes early in life appear protective rather than harmful.

This fascinating episode also delves into Scott's work preserving one of the world's most important fungal biobanks—a collection of approximately 15,000 living fungal strains, some dating back to the 1880s, including historically significant specimens like Alexander Fleming's original penicillin-producing mold. Despite its irreplaceable scientific value, this biological treasure trove faces an uncertain future due to funding challenges, highlighting the precarious nature of preserving biodiversity for future medical discoveries.

Whether you're a parent curious about giving your child the healthiest start in life, someone struggling with allergies or immune issues, or simply fascinated by how our microscopic companions influence our wellbeing, this episode will transform how you think about the relationship between humans and microorganisms. Subscribe now to explore more hidden wonders of the natural world with Under the Canopy.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 3 (01:11):
As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons
of our natural world becomeharder and harder to hear, but
they are still available tothose who know where to listen.
I'm Jerry Ouellette and I washonoured to serve as Ontario's
Minister of Natural Resources.
However, my journey into thewoods didn't come from politics.

(01:32):
Rather, it came from my time inthe bush and a mushroom.
In 2015, I was introduced tothe birch-hungry fungus known as
chaga, a tree conch withcenturies of medicinal
applications used by Indigenouspeoples all over the globe.
After nearly a decade ofharvest use, testimonials and

(01:56):
research, my skepticism hasfaded to obsession and I now
spend my life dedicated toimproving the lives of others
through natural means.
But that's not what the show isabout.
My pursuit of the strangemushroom and my passion for the
outdoors has brought me to theplaces and around the people
that are shaped by our naturalworld.

(02:17):
On Outdoor Journal Radio's Underthe Canopy podcast, I'm going
to take you along with me to seethe places, meet the people.
That will help you find youroutdoor passion and help you
live a life close to nature andunder the canopy.
So join me today for anothergreat episode and hopefully we
can inspire a few more people tolive their lives under the

(02:40):
canopy.
First off, as always, we wantto thank all our listeners all
around Canada, all throughoutthe world, switzerland, down in
Ghana, saudi Arabia, trinidad,tobago and, of course, the
States.
And, as usual, if you have anyquestions or any comments or you
want to hear any specific shows, let us know, send us an email.

(03:02):
Sometimes it takes a bit of timeto try and get it all figured
out and put together a showabout it, but we do try to do
that in many occasions and someof them I have.
I remember the one where theindividual from the Northwestern
States wanted more aboutoff-grid living.
So we even brought in peoplewith propane expertise to talk

(03:23):
about off-grid living withpropane and utilization of
things like that, andindividuals who actually are off
are living in unorganizedtownships and all that.
So we do try to accommodate asbest we can.
Now today's guest is James AScott James, welcome to the
program.

Speaker 4 (03:40):
Thanks, Jerry.
Thanks very much for theinvitation.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, no problem, I really appreciate it and I'm
looking at all the kind of stuffthat you've been working on and
some very interesting things.
So I think it's going to betough to limit it to the time.
I mentioned it to you.
But tell us about.
You know basically where you'refrom, so our international
listeners kind of get a sense ofwhere you are.

Speaker 4 (03:59):
So I'm in Toronto right now, but I grew up in a
little town on the north shoreof Lake Erie, right across from
Erie, pennsylvania called Simcoe, Ontario.
So I'm kind of from theheartland of southern Ontario
and I haven't really moved allthat far.
I moved, you know, maybe about120 miles to the northeast to

(04:22):
Toronto, and I've been here eversince.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Yeah, I know Simcoe well.
I did some town hall meetingsdown that way for the members
when I was a minister.
Down that way, Toby Barrett,Right, right, right, Yep, and as
I recall, it used to be whetherit still is or not the tobacco
capital of Ontario in that area.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah, I think it still is.
You know, tobacco is grownpretty commonly in crop rotation
with soybeans and corn, and youstill see tobacco being grown
there, although over the yearsthere's been a lot of buyback of
tobacco quotas.
So the industry there, theagricultural sector, has shrunk

(05:02):
considerably and tobacco as acash crop has been replaced by
things like ginseng and a bunchof other things.
So it's an area that's stillquite agriculturally dependent,
but it's undergone a lot ofchanges in the last 20 or 30
years.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, and one thing that I found very interesting
when I was dealing with thatarea was that actually the soil
configuration with tobacco andpeanuts coincide very well
together.
However, it seems that apresident, Jimmy Carter, was a
peanut farmer and protected thatindustry for the states
immensely, as we're seeing withsome of the things now happening

(05:41):
in the states, so that peanutsand utilizing peanuts outside
the States was not somethingthat was cash advantageous for a
lot of farmers.
So peanut growing does not takeplace to the extent that it
potentially could At leastthat's what I was told.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
It's true, it's something called a sandy fox
loam soil.
That's really characteristic ofthat region and it's great for
tobacco.
There are a few other crops aswell, but certainly peanuts, and
there are some longstandingpeanut operations down there.
But you know, a lot of theirsales, I think, are domestic,

(06:15):
they're direct-to-consumer sales.
There may be some provision ofingredients for product
manufacturing, that kind ofthing, but it's a.
It's a small but but stableindustry.
Those of us from the area youknow, often we'll gift each
other boxes of Ontario peanutsand peanut products for
Christmas.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
So it's Well, I have to tell you one, and I've been
trying to get peanut farmers todo something because thinking
outside the box and what it waswas when we go to camp, we have
a large crew, We've had as manyas 10, 15.
But one of the things thateverybody enjoys, believe it or
not, is peanut butter and hotbanana pepper rings, and

(06:57):
actually the peanut butterstabilizes the excess heat and
for jalapenos or hot bananapeppers it goes together
fantastic.
And I always thought thatthinking outside the box and
providing something like hotpeanut butter might be something
that market, that might be ableto be a niche market that

(07:19):
Ontario could jump onto.

Speaker 4 (07:20):
Well, I think it's an unexplored market and, you know
, peanuts are so nutritionallyrich and we have a great climate
not only for growing them butfor storing them.
One of the issues globally withpeanut cultivation is that
there are jurisdictions aroundthe world that grow them but
they have problems with storage,and there's a fungus that grows
on peanuts in storage calledAspergillus flavus, that

(07:43):
produces one of the most potentnaturally occurring toxins.
That's known, and it's a potentcarcinogen as well, in addition
to being very acutely toxic.
So if you look at some of thosejurisdictions where peanuts are
grown as basically nutritionalsupplements but they're stored
improperly, we see in thosepopulations high rates of liver

(08:03):
cancer and things like that thatwe just don't see in North
America, where peanuts are alsogrown and widely consumed.
But our storage is much better,according to our climate and as
well, we've got lots ofmechanisms to provide food
safety and monitoring of thequality of those crops as well

(08:25):
post-harvest.
So we have a couple ofadvantages in that regard.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Interesting Now.
Are you familiar with peanutstorage?
I mean, we're not going to talkabout it, we want to get on to
other things, but I'm sure a lotof listeners are going.
Well, how do you store peanutsthat make a difference in North?

Speaker 4 (08:40):
America.
Well, they need to be dry,right, and this is the thing.
We're blessed in many ways thatwe have a climate that's not.
It's not a tropical climate,it's not a subtropical climate,
you know, it's a Northerntemperate climate and we can
keep these products.
You know, peanuts, grains likerye grain and wheat and barley

(09:02):
and things like that corn aswell.
We can keep those thingspost-harvest in conditions that
prevent them from becomingsubject to mold growth.
And in other regions of theworld, particularly in the
tropical world, in Indonesia, inNorth Africa, areas where

(09:23):
there's a lot of peanutcultivation, it's much, much
more difficult.
You know, the crop is veryhappy to grow in those climates,
but it's much harder to storethose crops in a way that
prevents them from being subjectto post-harvest spoilage.
So that's really the kicker.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
So is it something that people need to worry about
when they're buying peanuts?
So is it something that peopleneed to worry about when they're
buying peanuts?
When they're buying them and alot of people feed squirrels and
things like that with peanutsand things like that Is it
something that can dismold or isit a fungus that is developing
on it?

Speaker 4 (09:54):
Yeah, moldy peanuts are fundamentally bad.
You don't want to eat moldypeanuts under any circumstances.
And peanuts that are grown inCanada, peanuts that are grown
in the United States, they'reall grown under conditions like.
This is something that's very,very well known, and where

(10:26):
peanuts are used as productingredients, say in peanut
butter, all of the majormanufacturers will subject their
products to very rigoroustesting for the presence of this
toxin.
And as the analytical methodsto detect the toxin aflatoxin
become more sophisticated, sothe limit that's allowable in
the products diminishes to thatlevel.
So you know none of thatmaterial is permitted in food
for human consumption in NorthAmerica, but you know other

(10:47):
jurisdictions don't necessarilyhave access to those kinds of
quality assurance mechanisms.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
Very interesting.
So, james, tell us a bit aboutyour position at the university,
here at the UNT.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Sure, yeah, I'm a professor in the Dalla Lana
School of Public Health at theUniversity of Toronto and so I'm
kind of an interestingcrossover guy.
So I'm in a group of researcherswho teach and research in a
subject called occupationalhygiene, which is really the

(11:21):
study of workplace exposures togases, vapors, chemicals,
particles, radioactive materials, industrial noise, all those
kinds of things.
And my teachable area is aroundbiological hazards generally,
because we know that there are anumber of work processes where
people are deliberately workingwith microbes.

(11:42):
People are deliberately workingwith microbes, say, in the
pharmaceutical sector, wheremicrobes are used to produce
certain biochemicals, but alsoin the agricultural sector where

(12:02):
microbes, incidentally, areinvolved in composting or all
these kinds of potentialexposures and inhalation
exposures, dermal exposures tothese materials can have some
associated health effects anddepending on the sector,
depending on the microorganismsthese are, you know they're
fairly rigorously controlledjust to prevent those kinds of
occupational illnesses inworkers.
So I bring to this program myknowledge of fungi but also

(12:23):
other microorganisms, and I'velong been interested in that
sort of overlap between howhumans and microorganisms
interact.
So this was a good fit for meI've been here since 2002, and
it's a really good fit because Ibring that dimension of
biological hazards that mycolleagues who work on asbestos

(12:44):
and noise-related hearing lossin industry lack.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Right.
So some of the research thatyou've done have been a lot with
infants, I believe, and withgut microbiome.
Microbiome yes, gut microbiomesfor a lot of infants and the

(13:11):
impacts of, for example, thelength of stay in a hospital or
whether mothers are smoking.
I'm seeing some of the researchthat you've done.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah, a bunch of things when I was doing my
doctoral work.
My doctoral work looked at housedust, so floor dust in houses,
and I was interested in thefungal ecology of floor dust in
houses because we know, and havelong known, that you can vacuum
up a vacuum cleaner bag full ofdust from your carpet or from

(13:41):
your floor and if you look atthe fungal content of that there
are lots and lots of fungi init.
Some of them are just passivelydeposited.
We bring them in on footwearwhen we come in from outside.
Others, you know, notionallyblow in through the window and
then over time will settle outin the dust.
But then there are some thatprobably are in the dust because

(14:04):
they live there and so all ofthose dust is sort of a
reservoir of those fungalparticles, is important in
contributing to indoor humanexposures to allergens or
irritants things like that.
So my doctoral work was lookingat the ecology of certain fungi

(14:25):
as they live in indoor dust,and so it was kind of a logical
step for me to kind of continueas a researcher to be interested
in indoor exposures likeexposures in the built
environment and how those canimpact health, exposures in the
built environment and how thosecan impact health.

(14:46):
So my work on the gutmicrobiome even though it sounds
very different, I think of itas still kind of an extension of
my interest in how exposures inthe built environment shape our
health.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Well, a lot of that when you're dealing with Dussel
would come in through the lungsas opposed to the stomach,
though, would it not?

Speaker 4 (15:02):
If you're breathing it in, oh sure.
But you know, particularly forthe younger amongst us who are
closer to the ground, who oftenare not walking on the ground
with two feet but, you know,crawling on the ground, their
exposures can be dermal, theycan be ingestion, they can be
inhalation.
They're usually some complexcombination.
So from the standpoint ofchildren's health, particularly

(15:25):
young children's health, thoseexposures can be really
formative.
And also they sort of representbaby's first exposure to things
that are not them, you know, tosort of the foreign biological
environment.
And in that way they're sort ofthey provide the training

(15:47):
ground for the immune system asit develops, to learn how to
appropriately respond to thingsthat are foreign.
And that seems to be thesequence of how that maturation
occurs, seems to be veryimportant in terms of either
putting babies at risk ofdeveloping allergic-type
diseases or immune-type diseasesor protecting them against

(16:09):
later life development of thosediseases.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
Well, I guess SIDS would be something substantially
different then, because thoseare pre-crawling stages that
infants pass on.

Speaker 4 (16:20):
Yeah, generally, and I'm not aware of what's been
done in the realm ofenvironmental exposures to SIDS
the first 100 days of life, howthose go go on to shape our

(16:53):
disease risk later in life, youknow, as children, as teenagers,
even as adults.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Two things.
Maybe you can just let ouraudience know the difference
between acute and chronic sothat people can gain an
understanding.
When you say acute, the impacts.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
Well, I'll use the workplace example because that's
the easiest to understand.
So the acute kind of healtheffect in a workplace is a
worker climbing up a ladder andthen falling off a ladder and
breaking their leg.
So that's an effect that isimmediately attributable to the
fall off the ladder and usuallythe time interval between the

(17:33):
fall and the individualsuffering in this case the
broken leg, is usually very,very short seconds.
Chronic exposures are the kindsof things that day over day a
worker may be exposed to alittle bit of it, but they don't
necessarily suffer an effectand it may be that even after

(17:54):
retirement they may be subjectto a kind of chronic,
late-emerging disease that's aconsequence of the exposures
that they incur during theirworking lives.
And you know, one of the bestexamples of that might be
firefighters and lung cancer.
And you know firefighters, ofcourse, are exposed to all kinds

(18:15):
of chemicals that are presentin smoke and other kinds of
materials that they may breatheover their careers.
And those incremental kind ofexposures, unfortunately, can
often have longer-term negativeeffects, particularly around the

(18:36):
development of lung cancer.
So that's an example of onethat's been known.
So that's the differencebetween acute disease and
chronic disease.
So it's the difference betweenwhat I'd say injury, which is an
acute disease, or occupationaldisease, which is a sort of
longer-term thing.
Sometimes it can be verydifficult to put all the pieces

(18:58):
together and understand howsomething like that arose.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
And most hospitals, realistically, are acute
hospitals where emergency roomis something that's immediately
dealing with something.
There I know there was a pushfor chronic hospitals as well,
for individuals who developexactly what you're speaking
about, but that's a wholedifferent subject that we could
get into.
Yeah, I'm going to give you onehere so I can tell I've got a

(19:24):
chocolate lab.
Listeners know, anson Gunnerand I got the look this morning.
Come on, dad, are we going?
And it's still maple syrup time, so we're out checking our
pails and stuff like that in themorning.
But anyways, one of the thingsthat I find is that because he
has to sleep beside the bed allthe time Anyways, he's got a

(19:49):
blanket that I put down for him.
That's on a little foam pad sortof thing, and I can tell when
he doesn't sleep well at nighthe gets moving around and he's
up all the time and he's shakinghis ears, his head, because
he's got something in his earsthat I need to put the blanket

(20:11):
inside, either wash it or put itin the dryer, and after I put
it in the dryer for a minimum of20 minutes, I can put it back
out and he has no reaction thenext night at all Interesting.
So I don't know if it's mitesthat are potentially causing the
problems or is it somethingthat you're dealing with with
all the dust and everything elsethat's potentially there, but

(20:32):
it's.
I can tell, and I did it lastnight, because the night before
he was up and down and he'sshaking his head and on and on
and on.
But last night I put it in for20 minutes before he called it a
night and didn't move the wholenight.

Speaker 4 (20:47):
Oh, wow, that's interesting.
Well, you know, there are abunch of things that can sort uh
crop up in situations like that.
There are uh mites that can getin dog's ears and and, um, they
can cause a problem.
Usually when you look in theear you'll see a little bit of
of wax accumulation.
You can see uh, you won'tnecessarily see the mites

(21:08):
crawling because they'remicroscopic, but you, you can
see sort of their effect andyou'll see a little bit of blood
staining, things like that anduh.
But but that's a situationwhere you, you pretty much need
to to treat the ear, and it'snot always treated with
something to kill the mites,it's.
It's often just treated withsomething to sort of flush out
the ear so that it's lesshospitable to the mites, and

(21:29):
then it heals on its own, um, sothat's one example.
There there are fungi that canalso get in dogs' ears, like the
sort of famous example.
It' ears are a delight to thisfungus.
It has a predilection for them.

(21:57):
So the fungus can overgrow indogs' ears and it can cause a
lot of irritation, inflammation,that kind of thing.
It doesn't really invade thetissue of the ear, it just grows
on the waxes and when it doesthat, it will produce chemicals,
enzymes that can cause, provokea little bit of allergic
reaction in the dog's ear canaland that kind of thing.

(22:19):
So that's another thing.
But that's not likely to goaway just with heating up the
pad.
The more likely cause for theexample that you described is
maybe some kind of otherallergen that's getting tracked
in, because of course the dog istracking in material on its

(22:41):
feet as it's wandering around.
Maybe it's got something that'sa little bit of an allergen or
irritant that you know thechemistry of that is destroyed
by the heat.
That's very possible too.
Dogs can be sensitive to allkinds of things.

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Oh, I know that, for I had a beagle once Tessa was
her name and I gotta tell you Ihad her probably to eight
different vets that nobody couldfigure out what her problem was
because she was chewing herpaws raw, until finally the
owner of one vet clinic, bradBaker, he says look go up and
see this vet in Fenland Falls.

(23:18):
And so we went to Fenland Fallsand he happened to be the
president of the CanadianVeterinary Association.
But he did testing and he didactually allergy testing for the
dog and we found out that itwas allergic to grass pollen.
Wow, and that's why it waschewing its paws raw and he said
look when it comes in from arun, just wash them off in a

(23:39):
pail of water.
And guess what?
We never had a problem again.

Speaker 4 (23:41):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
So some of these things are interesting, but tell
us about some of this researchon the gut microbiome.
Microbiome.
I think that's a microbiota.

Speaker 4 (23:56):
Yeah, so it's largely bacterial and the gut
microbiome really refers to thatpopulation of bacteria that
live in our gut and they do alot of useful things there.
They're involved in helping ourbody to process the materials

(24:19):
that we eat.
Depending on the configurationof our gut microbiome, it's
thought that certain kinds ofgut microbiome composition may
actually increase the potentialfor certain types of conditions.
It could increase the potentialfor obesity, for example.
It could increase the potentialfor inflammatory diseases like

(24:42):
asthma.
But essentially when we're born, there are bacteria in our gut.
When we're born which you know,it's taken a lot of scientists,
a lot of very careful study tounderstand that to be the case,
because it was long thought thatbabies were born essentially

(25:03):
sterile.
You know 100% baby.
But there's a little bit there,and how it gets there, no one
really knows.
But it does start out.
But when the baby is born,fundamentally most of its cells
are human cells and very few arebacterial cells inside the gut.
And then within the firstcouple of months, say the first

(25:23):
hundred days of life, the infantgut becomes colonized by this
basically bacterial biofilm thatwe call the gut microbiome,
this basically bacterial biofilmthat we call the gut microbiome
, and it does so throughexposures to parents sharing
their microbiome.
If there's a dog in the house,probably it contributes a little

(25:45):
bit.
Maybe the baby crawling aroundon the floor eating dust or
touching its mouth, thatprobably contributes.
All of these thingscollectively contribute to the
establishment of that biofilminside the gut.
And so the sequence of whichorganisms come in when turns out

(26:07):
that it's actually veryimportant.
And if you were to raise thebaby in just in a perfectly
sterile environment where youdelay its ability to have its
gut become colonized in thatmanner, it actually causes the
adaptive immune system, which issort of the main flank of our

(26:29):
immune system that responds toinvaders, invaders.
It causes that flank of theimmune system to mature in a way
that improperly responds tothings that are foreign.
So it can cause us to becomeallergic.
It can cause us to developdiseases related to this immune

(26:52):
dysfunction throughout the restof our lives.
So how and when baby is exposedto the things that it is in its
environment turns out to beextremely important, and it's
something that I think peoplehad long suspected.
But no one really understoodproperly the mechanism.
And now in the last 20 yearswe're starting to understand

(27:13):
that much more clearly and werealize that it's of tremendous
importance.

Speaker 3 (27:18):
Right.
Well, one of your studies wasthe impact of postpartum
hospital length of stay oninfant gut microbiota, a
comprehensive analysis of thevaginal and cesarean birth.

Speaker 4 (27:34):
So the type of birth, whether it's cesarean or
vaginal, is having actuallyimpacts on kids as well it does,
and you can see it Like if youhave a population of babies and
you look at their poop.
It was difficult for me toconvince my lab technician to
really want to do this job.
But once you start doing it,the science and the interest in

(27:57):
the science kind of outweighsthe ick factor.
But if you were just to take apopulation of babies and look at
their poop, say at three monthsof age, without asking any
questions, just looking at whattypes and numbers of bacteria
are in the poop, you can easilydifferentiate those babies that

(28:19):
are delivered by cesareansection versus those that are
delivered by vaginal birth,really, and the ones that are
delivered by vaginal birth havea head start.
And you know you can sort ofunderstand why.
Because there's potential, apotential during birth, for
example, for cross-contaminationwith fecal contamination.

(28:40):
We talk about that ascontamination, but really what
that does is it helps to instillin the baby some of the early
elements of that healthymicrobiome that the baby
inherits from mom, and thatturns out to be a very important
thing.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Interesting.
Now my family has a geneticdisorder where both parents have
something called Stargardt's,which is kind of a macular
degeneration sort of impact onthe eyes that they haven't been
able to deal with.
But my understanding through myfather, who had it, and so did

(29:22):
a number of his siblings anduncles etc, etc.
That it was passed on from themother to the child during a
vaginal birth and I'm not sureyou would have far more
expertise Is that somethingthat's legitimate or is it just
a hearsay?
Because I often wonder then, ifthat's the case, if both

(29:43):
parents do have this potentialgene problem, is a cesarean a
way to ensure that it's notpassed on to the children, or
would you know anything about?

Speaker 4 (29:51):
that?
No, I don't know anything aboutthat.
There's certainly, you know,there are some things that can
in a way get passed onenvironmentally.
After we started doing thiswork, I got really curious about
well, we now understand alittle bit more about what the
role is, say, of vaginaldelivery, or the role of

(30:13):
breastfeeding versus formulafeeding, and breastfeeding is
also very protective of the baby, developing a sort of normally
calibrated adaptive immunesystem.
But then I got thinking well,you know what about house dust?
Because many of the sameorganisms that we see in the gut
microbiome you can find geneticsignatures of those in house

(30:37):
dust.
So I got the idea well, maybewe can do some DNA sequencing of
the dust from the houses wherethe babies came from and we can
sequence the stool of the babiesand we can figure out.
Just based on looking at thebacteria alone in those two
places, we can figure out whichbaby goes with which house and

(30:59):
we can shockingly Maybe notshockingly and you can think,
okay, well, there's twopossibilities there, right?
One is that when mom or dad arechanging diapers, there's
potential for the baby toinfluence the dust, right, right
.
The other is a little bit more,I'll say, sinister, and that is

(31:20):
the idea that the baby may beingesting material from the
environment in the home.
That, then, is colonizing thebaby and influencing its gut
microbiome.
So if that's the case, then ifyou're new parents and you move
to a new home right around thetime your baby is born, there

(31:44):
could be potential for your babyto inherit the gut microbiome
of the people who lived therebefore.
So I think, understanding someof these factors, it has, I
think, important bearing on howthese things can influence
disease in early life, but alsolater in life, and these are

(32:07):
questions that people have onlystarted to be able to ask
because of the technology that'sbecome available the technology
that's become available.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
So are we looking down the line here that the
introduction of baby probioticsis something that would be
beneficial to youth to ensurethat some of these things that
aren't happening out there,whether it's certain diseases or
development of things, could belimited by having the right
probiotic?

Speaker 4 (32:33):
Well for sure, there are cultures globally that have
known this anecdotally andtraditionally for centuries, for
millennia.
And while we haven't reallyfully understood the mechanism
for why these things work,there's really not any doubt
that they do work.
And maybe, to the Swisslisteners, the idea of using

(32:57):
yogurt as a nutritionalamendment early in life, from a
very early time point, is longknown.
And you know it's done for areason.
And it's done because it'shealth protective.
And while we haven't reallyknown what the mechanism is, we
know the effect.
But we're starting now tounderstand much better what that

(33:18):
mechanism is.
And the reason that it'simportant is because we know
that asthma, allergy and asthmaare important diseases in
childhood, much more so todaythan they used to be when I was
a kid, probably when you were akid too, especially in
westernized countries.
And what we know from thegenetics because these are

(33:41):
issues that have been looked atvery closely and they're pretty
well understood that genescontribute to who gets these
diseases.
But genes alone only explainabout half of asthma in
childhood, explain about half ofasthma in childhood, and what

(34:01):
that means is that the otherhalf is probably explained by an
environment.
So if we can understand whatthose factors are in the
environment that contribute tothat additional 50% of risk,
then potentially those could bemodifiable characteristics of
lifestyle that we could make ahuge dent in this asthma
epidemic in childhood.
So that's really the value inasking these kinds of questions

(34:24):
and looking at these variousexposures in the environment and
trying to understand thempotentially even if there's
aspects of looking at autism aswell as being one of the other
components.
Yeah, 100%.
A lot of people have beeninterested in the question of
autism.
You know, there are manymysteries with autism and we

(34:46):
know increasingly that there isthis interaction between the gut
and the brain that scientistshave only started to realize,
I'd say, in the past 20 years.
And the more people havestudied it, the more it's become
clear that there is a lot ofvery important crosstalk between

(35:07):
what happens in our gut andwhat happens in our brain.
And, you know, I see in thefuture that people, as this
interaction is better understood, I think we'll probably we're
on the precipice of a number ofimportant discoveries in regard

(35:27):
to neurological disorders,probably clarifying some not all
, but at least some of theideology of diseases like autism
and others.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, well, actually I believe it was Dr Greg Thorne
are you familiar with?
Yes, Okay, and Greg was the onethat suggested I contacted you
in regards to getting on thepodcast, and thankfully so.
Thank you very much, Greg, butone of the things that we
discussed there was his researchon lion's mane mushroom

(36:03):
mycelium.
That, actually and I've seenstudies that indicate that it
has the potential to develop andgrow neural pathways in the
brain and spinal column toassist with individuals dealing
with things like Alzheimer's,Parkinson's, dementia and things
along those lines.
So there are a lot of differentpotential fungi that are out

(36:26):
there that may have benefits,but there's also ones, from what
I'm hearing here, that couldhave negative cumulative effect
or chronic effect on individuals.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
Yeah, it's a mix.
You know, fungi are thesemarvelous biochemical factories.
They can do things in a singlecell or in a small cluster of
cells that it would take teamsof scientists vast amounts of
money to do in a laboratorysetting, if they could do it at
all.
Like, fungi are able to producethese truly miraculous chemical

(36:59):
structures, and a number ofthose have really interesting
interactions with the cells ofother organisms, humans being
one.
So we're really, you know, eventhough we've known about the
miracle of penicillin, forexample, since 1928 or 29 in

(37:20):
Alexander Fleming's work, rightchemicals that would be of
interest for pharmaceuticals orother purposes, we're really
only starting to see the tip ofthe iceberg of the potential for

(37:42):
that.
And so I think, as weunderstand that more and
understand the relationshipbetween human and fungi more,
some of these chemicals thatthey make, they're analogs of
human neurotransmitters.
And why a fungus in naturethat's living in a habitat where
it can't access very muchnitrogen?
You know, it's these verycarbon-rich, nitrogen-limited

(38:04):
habitats why it would take thenitrogen that it can get, the
little bit of nitrogen it canget, and turn it into this
compound that's like a humanneurotransmitter, why it would
do that.
It makes no sense at all.
It seems like a huge waste ofmetabolism of a very expensive
resource, yet it does it.

(38:24):
So there must be someevolutionary reasons for fungri
being able to do these kinds ofthings.
And I think the more we startto understand that by being able
to do these kinds of things,and I think the more we start to
understand that, the more we'llsee a lot of value in many of
these interesting chemistriesthat fungicide produce.

Speaker 5 (38:50):
Hi everybody.
I'm Angelo Viola and I'm PeteBowman.
Now you might know us as thehosts of Canada's favorite
fishing show, but now we'rehosting a podcast.
That's right.
Every Thursday, ang and I willbe right here in your ears
bringing you a brand new episodeof Outdoor Journal Radio.
Hmm, now, what are we going totalk about for two hours every
week?
Well, you know there's going tobe a lot of fishing.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and
how to catch them, and they wereeasy to catch.

Speaker 5 (39:16):
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Speaker 6 (39:18):
We're going to be talking to people from all
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(39:38):
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are.
Outdoor Journal Radio seeks toanswer the questions and tell
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Find us on Spotify, applePodcasts or wherever you get
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Speaker 3 (40:07):
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Tula, you've had some goodexperiences with Chaga.
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Speaker 7 (40:20):
Yes, I got sick with fibro and one weekend my husband
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And so we started putting it inour morning smoothie.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
Right.

Speaker 7 (40:42):
And among a few other things that I was doing.
Because of that, the chaga hasbeen the steady one Right.
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Speaker 3 (40:53):
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Speaker 7 (41:01):
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Yeah, I had a little bit ofhigh elevated blood pressure and
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Speaker 3 (41:17):
And you think the chaga was the reason why.

Speaker 7 (41:19):
Well, I didn't do anything else in that time frame
Very good.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
And so how much chaga did you have and how did you
have it?

Speaker 7 (41:27):
Well, we just put that powder in a smoothie, right
?
And it's about a tablespoon?
No, it's less than a tablespoonfor two of us, so you don't
need that much.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Right About a teaspoon.
Yeah, yeah, very good.
Well, thanks very much forsharing that.
We really appreciate that andwish you all the best with the
Chaga.
Oh, you're from Finland as well, and Chaga is pretty popular in
Finland, is it not?

Speaker 7 (41:53):
I think it probably is, because there's some
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about it, and of course, it'sbig in Russia right because
that's where you know thenorthern woods that came comes
from.
Yeah, yeah, and of courseFinland has lots of perch trees.

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Right, yeah, and it's the only mushroom that you
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Well, thanks very much forsharing that.
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(42:47):
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Hey, thanks for listening.
Back to the episode.
Now I need to mention one thing.

(43:31):
You mentioned about the Swissand yogurt and utilizing that,
the probiotics found in there.
But there was Ned who was astaunch Cape Breton-er, and Ned
used to tell me all the time hesays you know, jerry, once in a
while you just got to eat alittle dirt.
And I said what he said.

(43:51):
Yep, he said it's good for youbecause it helps all his systems
and everything else, andwhether that's a thing from
Crepe Breton or a family thingor not, but certainly the amount
of bacterial components foundin a little bit of dirt out
there would have certain effectson individuals as well that we
don't know or do or are startingto know starting to know it's

(44:19):
true, and for 20 years we'veknown that kids who are raised
in rural situations and on farmshave somewhat lower incidence
of these kinds of diseasesallergy and asthma and so it's
been thought that there is somefarm protective effect and that
it may be that it's exposure toto dirt effectively um and uh.

Speaker 4 (44:40):
So it's, it's important.
The more that we understandabout this, the better we've.
We've come through a period of50 or 60 or 70 years where we've
done almost everything in ourpower to sterilize our
environment, to spray ourenvironments with sprays that
kill things and make them asabsolutely clean as possible,
and we're now starting to seethat that approach has had

(45:04):
negative effects and we'restarting to understand the
mechanism of those effects.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
Well, I believe that there were some studies that
showed that Mennonites and theAmish, there were some studies
that showed that Mennonites andthe Amish the number of, well,
the amount of time that they getsick is substantially reduced.
And it was predetermined orbelieved that the reason was
exactly like we were justtalking about.
And I used to say that in thelegislature, all the time that

(45:32):
we herbicide, pasteurize, purify, in the legislature, all the
time that we herbicide,pasteurize, purify, we do
everything out there in orderand then try to grow that
singular culture out there for apristine lawn and then wonder
why we have all these problemsout there and people can't bring
the two together to realizethat there are negative effects

(45:52):
of a lot of those aspects andeverything that we do.
There are negative effects of alot of those aspects in
everything that we do.
I think it was I can't remember, was it 36 or 50?
Every breath we take, we takein various problematic materials
with every breath that we take,but we also take in the ones
that can resolve a lot of it forus when we breathe in a lot of

(46:12):
these things as well.

Speaker 4 (46:14):
Yeah, it's true, there's lots of stuff that comes
in a breath.
I was 20 years ago.
The Toronto Star approached meand wanted to do a little piece
on air pollution in a way thathelped people to really
understand it.
So I got an air sampler and Itook it out.
I actually think I took it infront of the legislature here in

(46:37):
Toronto and I stood on thefront lawn.
I've done this before.
Sometimes when you do that, thesecurity guard comes out and
wonders what you're doing.
So I took an air sample aroundQueen's Park and I took the air
sample back to the lab and itwas basically putting all of the
particles in the air down on amicroscope slide.

(46:59):
I put the microscope slideunder the microscope and I
calibrated the view field sothat what I had in a single
field and I could take aphotograph of it was the
particles that would be in onebreath of air.
Right was the particles thatwould be in one breath of air
Right.
And then I went through thephotograph and I labeled what
all the particles were andtalked a little bit about where

(47:20):
the air sample had come from andsort of where these particles
had originated, and then talkedabout what some of the health
issues are from them.
Of course there's lots ofdifferent plant pollen grains.
There's rubber that shed offtires as they go through,
there's the particulatecondensates from diesel

(47:41):
combustion.
There's a whole variety ofthings that you find in the air,
and individually these thingsthey don't really matter.
They may have minor influencesover the period of your life if
you're exposed to certainamounts of these things, but I
think it's very helpful to justunderstand that they're all
there and where they come from,and you know, to the extent that

(48:05):
we know, what they're capableof doing.
So I thought it was sort of afun way for people to be able to
look at that and say, hey, thisis what the air that we breathe
looks like, because it allowsyou to sort of take these
abstract ideas and see them in amuch more concrete way.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
Yeah, absolutely I would be.
I'm quite surprised.
I'm fascinated to hear thatrubber was actually in the air,
and I do know that back in the80s one of the highest
contaminants in the air wasactually lead from lead gasoline
.
That can have cumulativeeffects and I often wonder if

(48:43):
some of the things that we'redealing with now is not a result
of the lead that was in the airat that time, and now it's been
substantially reduced so thatthere's virtually no lead in the
air because we've taken thelead out of gasoline.
So there are a lot of thingsthat can be done to make our
environment that much better.

Speaker 4 (48:59):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Yeah, so some of the other things that you dealt with
was maternal smoking duringpregnancy increases the risk of
gut myelobome.
Microbiome yes, the microbiomeI keep going back to microbiota

(49:23):
Microbiome associated withchildhood overweight and obesity
.
How did you find her, what cameup and how did this idea start
to come forward?

Speaker 4 (49:34):
So all of these papers and this theme were part
of a much larger study called.
We now call it the CHILD Study,but originally that was an
acronym for the Canadian HealthyInfant Longitudinal Development
Study, child acronym that myfriend and colleague PJ Sbarro,

(49:55):
who's a pediatric respirologistat SickKids in Toronto, came up
with a really clever, cleveracronym.
Anyway, we recruited moms intheir third trimester of
pregnancy from multiple sites inCanada and I think we got a
total of about 3,600 moms andthen we followed their babies

(50:21):
basically from delivery up untilwe're still following them.
I think they're probably maybeeight to 10 years of age now,
maybe 12 years the oldest, andwe did a lot of work trying to
um, and we did a lot of worktrying to characterize, uh, mom
and dad, uh, looking at geneticsand genetic risk factors,

(50:42):
looking at um diet and behavior,um, smoking, of course, things
like that, uh, and, and we alsospent a lot of effort looking at
the environment where the babywas raised and to the extent
that we would send out thesetrained inspectors to basically
look at the environment, to sortof capture all of the various

(51:05):
cleaning chemicals that wereused, to look at the furnishings
and things like that, to lookat the type of housing and also
to collect samples from the homein the form of settled dust on
floors, which sort of representsthe main reservoir, as I was
saying, for the particles thatwe're exposed to as we live.

(51:28):
We're all sort of like the Idon't know if you remember the
Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon.
We're all a little bit like thecharacter Pigpen, oh yeah,
where as we go about ourday-to-day activities, you know,
and move across our floor, wesort of stir up these particles.
So we're always kind ofsurrounded by this shell of

(51:50):
particles that we breathe in,many of which are stirred up by
our mechanical activity ofwalking across flooring and just
being animated and that kind ofthing.
And in a home, the floor andthe carpet in particular if
there is carpet, is the mainreservoir that contributes to

(52:11):
that, what we call the personalcloud.
So we wanted to take a closelook at the personal cloud and
see what impact it had.
But anyway, so we collected onthese 3,500 or so babies like a
lot of very detailed informationabout their time activity,
about where they lived, abouttheir proximity to parks, about

(52:32):
the type of home that they livedin, whether there was a dog or
a cat, et cetera, and one of thethings that we did additionally
was to collect stool samples atbirth so the meconium that
comes out of the baby right whenthe baby is born, a stool
sample at 100 days of life andthen a stool sample at one year

(52:53):
of life life and then a stoolsample at one year of life and
tried to kind of integrate allof these various things that we
measured to figure out how thosedata tell a story about the
development of the baby and thedevelopment of the shaping of
risk.
So yeah, so back to youroriginal question.
It's just, you know, we startedto tease out what the effects

(53:16):
were from the various thingsthat we measured on.
You know how they may impact,in our case the microbiome.
Other scientists who areworking on this birth cohort
would look at other elements ofit.
This has been a very, very bigproject for a lot of scientists
over many years now and you knowthose of us who are doing this

(53:39):
piece on the gut microbiome areonly like a tiny sliver of a
much, much larger study that hasreally found an incredible
amount to date of interestingfindings and actionable findings
from a population healthprotective standpoint about
early life.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
So even, but you mentioned about the smoking and
the impact on obesity,potentially for a lot of youth
as well.

Speaker 4 (54:06):
Yes.
So smoking as an example, wesee that, maybe not surprisingly
, that there are effects thatoccur as a consequence of either
being exposed to secondhandsmoke in the home or potentially
from baby being exposed throughmom smoking during pregnancy

(54:30):
that can alter again thetrajectory of the gut microbiome
development.
That in turn can have impactson health risk for certain
things, and obesity in this caseis one.
So you know, you don'tnecessarily start out thinking,
hey, these things are related.
But then when you start to lineup the data and you see the

(54:51):
story that it tells, it becomesvery interesting.
And you see the story that ittells, it becomes very
interesting.
And you know, the gutmicrobiome turns out to be the
mechanism by which a lot ofthese elements in our
environment are perceived andthereby imparting some kind of
health outcome.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
So one thing that I'll mention is that I strongly
believe in a lot of your thesison a lot of impacts on breathing
in and the impacts on that.
One of the things that I didwhen our sons were born was I
bought very high quality airpurifiers and had them in their
rooms where they spent most oftheir time whether it was

(55:30):
sleeping or playing on the floorand things like that was
sleeping or playing on the floorand things like that just to
ensure that the air quality theywere breathing in weren't
taking in any potential negativeimpacts just like you're
talking about.
Every time you walk on a carpetor a step or anything else, it
goes into the air and youpotentially breathe it in.
And that was one of the waysthat I tried to ensure that give
them the best start in life bylimiting the negative potential

(55:53):
impacts and things like that.
Is that something that would bebeneficial or not?
What do you think?

Speaker 4 (56:00):
So it used to be that pediatricians would tell their
patients you know, if you don'twant your baby to be allergic to
cats, then don't get a cat.
And that was sort of theconventional advice.
Of course, none of it was basedon any kind of evidence, it was
just intuition on the part ofpediatricians.
And it turns out that on thatfact, all pediatricians were

(56:23):
wrong, excluding people whopotentially would have a genetic
predisposition to cat allergy,which explains some amount of
people Absent that risk factor.
Living in a home with a cat isprobably protective against the

(56:43):
child developing cat allergy.
So it's exactly the opposite ofthe advice that generations of
pediatricians gave theirpatients.
And it's only through a studylike this child study that we
can start to understand from anevidentiary standpoint what
these risks are.

(57:03):
So the kinds of things that makeintuitive sense don't
necessarily always work out theway that we expect them to.
So I think that something likean air filter.
I can see a lot of positivebenefits for using air
filtration, right, but you know,that's sort of based on

(57:24):
intuition and the question iswell, where is the evidence on
it?
And the evidence in certaincases it may be that it's
beneficial to have inhalationexposures to those naturally
occurring things.
Maybe if you're living next toa highway where there's lots of
pollution particulate, thenthat's something that you would
want to reduce.

(57:45):
So I think it depends on thesituation the extent to which
those kinds of technologies aregoing to be valuable.
But fundamentally it's an areawhere we don't have a lot of
evidence.
What we have is our intuition,and sometimes it's wrong.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
Right.
So you mentioned about thecat's negative aspect, that if
you want to make sure they'renot allergic to cats, one of the
things is expose them to them.
What about peanuts and whatwe're hearing now?
The same sort of thing.
Is it not that we're hearingthe exact same?

Speaker 4 (58:19):
now.
Yeah, so the longer you delayexposure to peanut, the more
likely it becomes that a childcan develop allergy, and severe
allergy to peanut.
So what it seems like now isthat there's a kind of timing
and I don't remember offhandexactly what the timing is.
The pediatricians who areinterested in childhood allergy

(58:42):
now know this very well.
But there's a kind of time inthat very, very early life
trajectory when if you introducesome minor amounts of peanut at
that point, it actually has aprotective effect.
So that's something where wenow have some mounting evidence
that the very carefullyorchestrated and timed early

(59:07):
life introduction of thatallergen can have a protective
effect.
It's not delay the exposure aslong as you can, which sort of
made intuitive sense, but itactually increased the risk.
So we now know that you know,adding peanut into that sequence
of foods that you expose babyto in very early life, in a

(59:27):
particular defined sequence, itcan actually help tremendously
to avoid the you know the badoutcome of having a serious
allergy.

Speaker 3 (59:38):
Right Now.
Is it just through consumptionthat it hits the exposure, or is
it breathing in the fumes fromcooking with peanuts, things
like that as well?

Speaker 4 (59:47):
So peanut allergen is not really a volatile material
at all.
It's a big protein, right, it'san enzyme, and so you really
can't volatilize it.
It's something that needs to beexposed, basically through

(01:00:08):
ingestion.
Maybe there's potential to docontact exposure as well, but I
think that primarily it's goingto be an ingestion exposure.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Interesting.
Well, james, now tell us aboutthe data bank that you're
maintaining, or havingdifficulty maintaining, there at
U of T.

Speaker 4 (01:00:29):
Sure.
Well, this gets back to sort ofmy main interest.
You know, the reason that I gotinto science in the first place
was because, um of a professorwho taught me a course on fungi,
um, in my first year ofuniversity and uh, and from that
point on I was sold about fungibecause, uh, they're so

(01:00:49):
interesting, so few people studythem and uh, you know, there's
a lot of opportunity to reallymake a dent in something and not
have a lot of competition whileyou're doing it.
So I got really interested infungi very early on and, of
course, I went and did graduatework in fungi and publish

(01:01:19):
studies on them.
We want to be able to take thestrains that we work on and make
those available to otherresearchers who could
potentially come along and buildon our research or find things
that we did wrong and refute it.
That's the nature of science,and so part of how fungal
science works is that we havethese biobanks and there are

(01:01:39):
multiple of these biobanksinternationally, where a
scientist who's done work on aparticular fungus will deposit
some living representatives ofthe things that they worked on
so that other scientists couldcome along and request those
same strains and do more work onthem and request those same
strains and do more work on them.

(01:02:02):
So this particular biobank is abiobank that was started in the
1930s in Alberta, and it wasstarted under the auspices of
the Alberta Public HealthNetwork, and it collected and
retained fungi that were causesof disease or illness in
patients from across Alberta,but then it expanded to across
Canada and internationally, andnot just fungi that cause

(01:02:25):
disease, but fungi that areassociated with plants, maybe
cause plant disease, fungi thatcause animal disease, fungi that
cause wood rot, fungi that do awhole bunch of different things
.
So this biobank grew and grewand grew and it became one of
the most important globalbiobanks of fungi that
researchers would come to fromall over the world to request

(01:02:46):
strains.
And in 2015, the University ofAlberta, which had been
maintaining the biobank up tothat point, decided that they
were no longer interested andable to keep it after its
curator retired.
They were looking for a placefor it and I thought, well, I'll

(01:03:15):
take the thing on, I'll scrapetogether a little bit of money
if I can and donate some on myown and hopefully, over some
years, I'll be able to find somesustainable way to fund this.
And it's been 10 years sinceit's been here, I've applied for
multiple different grantsprovincial grants, federal

(01:03:38):
grants, research grants andthere is no way to get traction
on funding this.
And the difficulty is that itdoesn't really do research on
its own.
It provides research materials.
So it's kind of like, if youcan imagine a chemist who needs
a chemical for their research,they need magnesium sulfate.
So they open up a chemicalcatalog and they order a bottle

(01:04:00):
of magnesium sulfate and acouple days later the magnesium
sulfate shows up.
Well, if you're a mycologist ora microbiologist, there aren't
catalogs where you can orderthis microorganism or that
microorganism.
You have to go to one of thesebiobanks and if the biobank
doesn't have it, then you haveto go to another biobank and
ultimately, if no biobanks haveit, then you need to change

(01:04:20):
something about your researchbecause you can't get the
organism.
So safeguarding this resourceis really important, but it's
not something that specificallydoes research.
It supports other researchprograms.
We don't currently in Canadahave funding mechanisms to

(01:04:42):
support these kinds of researchsupports.
You know, like the people andit's not just fungi or
microorganisms there's peoplewho use medical isotopes and
they're increasingly verydifficult to acquire in a timely
way.
There's increasingly people whoneed helium for quantum

(01:05:05):
computing, for other problems inphysics, and it's very, very
difficult to get that.
So there are these kinds ofessential research platforms
that in Canada we used to havesome mechanisms to fund these,
but since about 2012, there havebeen no federal mechanisms
available to fund these kinds ofimportant research platforms.

(01:05:27):
So it means that we need to.
You know, if we can get them incountry, we do that, but if we
can't get them in country, thenwe need to go out of country to
be able to secure access tothese things and increasingly
it's difficult to do that, likethe parallel biobanks in the

(01:05:47):
United States.
For example, very recently themain one, that's an agricultural
fungal biobank it put up a bignotice on its website that said
we no longer provide materialsto scientists outside of the
United States.
So if you're a Canadianscientist and you need strains,

(01:06:07):
that they have we mirror some oftheir strains in our biobank,
but you can't go directly tothem anymore and acquire those.
So you know some of these, Iguess, logistics mechanisms.
They're increasingly fragileand they're dependent on the
politics of the day.
They're dependent on supplychains and we learned through

(01:06:31):
COVID that you know some ofthese things that are essential
for, you know, national securityor other national interests,
and certainly research is one ofthose.
We need to find ways to securethose and access to those
resources in-country, because wejust we cannot any longer rely

(01:06:52):
on other countries to provide uswith those kinds of materials,
right?
So?

Speaker 3 (01:06:58):
James, how do you maintain a biobank like?

Speaker 4 (01:07:01):
this Well, the organisms, and there's about I
don't know, maybe about 14,000or 15,000 strains of them.
So they're preserved in livingform, but in a variety of
methods.
So a number of them arecryogenically maintained.
There's some that can befreeze-dried and we can maintain

(01:07:22):
them in glass vials in afreeze-dried format.
There's others that need to bepreserved under limited oxygen
conditions on growth media.
So we use an overlay withmineral oil.
Depending on the organism, somecan be preserved in one or two
ways, but not in others.
So we would typically, for eachone of the strains in the

(01:07:44):
collection, we would preserve itunder maybe four or five
different means and thenhopefully it will be successful
in at least one of those.
But some of the oldestmaterials that we have in the
collection were originallyobtained in the 1880s.
So these are some of the very,very first fungi that were

(01:08:07):
obtained in pure culture, livingin pure culture, that were
collected, and some reallyimportant ones, like the one
that was originally fromAlexander Fleming's Petri dish
and then the one from thecantaloupe and peoria that later
went on to provide all of thepenicillin for the war effort

(01:08:27):
during the Second World War.
Other fungi that are used toproduce drugs, like the first
statin, lovastatin was producedby a fungus.
So all kinds of things thathave been of critical importance
to a variety of humanenterprise.
We preserve all of those.

Speaker 3 (01:08:48):
So obviously, if you freeze-dried them, they still
must be able to survive taking afreeze drying.

Speaker 4 (01:08:54):
Yeah, they can, but it's only a small fraction of
the strains that can be freezedried.
Unfortunately, a number of themneed to be preserved in a way
that requires them to be tendedvery frequently.
So if we run out of money forthe person who's tending them
and they no longer get tended,then you know much like a zoo.

(01:09:17):
They die and you can't replacethem.

Speaker 3 (01:09:22):
Right.
So when there's requests to getthese materials, do you sell
them to people who may makerequests in order to generate
revenue to maintain them?

Speaker 4 (01:09:29):
Yeah a bit.
You know, for a few hundreddollars we would provide a
license to use the strain andthen send a copy of the strain.
But we have never been able togenerate enough revenue from
strain distribution to be ableto maintain the collection costs

(01:09:51):
Typically maybe $20,000 or$30,000 a year we would get in
revenue from strain sales andthat's barely enough to put
liquid nitrogen in our nitrogentanks to preserve the
cryogenically preserved strains.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
Right.
So what kind of funding wouldan annual cost to maintain these
14,000 to 15,000 strains youhave?

Speaker 4 (01:10:17):
The annual cost is actually low.
It's basically the salary ofthe person who's doing the
curatorial work, which all in ismaybe about $100,000 a year
with benefits and then spacecosts.
So it's like it's an ongoingsalary cost really, but it's the
kind of salary that you can'tjustify in a research grant

(01:10:38):
Right, and there's no other wayto do it.
Amount of money that wouldcover the costs of the technical
person maintaining thematerials and offset a little

(01:10:59):
bit of the cost of, you know,the person doing the director
work on the collection andmaking sure that all of the
records are up to date and thatkind of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:08):
Right, so if somebody donates, can they get a tax
receipt for a donation?

Speaker 4 (01:11:13):
Yeah, it would be through the university, and the
university provides tax receiptsfor it.
But it's a matter of you know.
We've been working with acouple of potential foundation
funders who have expressed someinterest, so we've had a couple
of bites.
But it's you know.
The devil is always in thedetails and I think this is an

(01:11:37):
unusual situation.
Most countries that have thesekinds of assets, it's government
that funds them and we justwe've never been government
funded except through a coupleof grant funding programs that
have long been mothballed Right.
So we're in a unique positionin comparison to similar

(01:12:00):
biobanks in other countries.

Speaker 3 (01:12:03):
Interesting and I imagine this biobank is growing
all the time.
Are you finding new strainsthat are coming forward as we're
getting the melting of the icecaps or the glaciers and things
like that, the exposure toprehistoric?

Speaker 4 (01:12:17):
materials.
We've got huge collections ofinteresting things.
We've probably got the world'slargest collection of pathogens
of reptiles.
We've got a lot of pathogens ofbats Of course those have been
in the news lately the agentthat causes white nose of bat,
which is killing off globallypopulations of multiple bat

(01:12:37):
species.
We've got a lot of emerginghuman pathogens.
Yeah, we've got many, manyinteresting things, and not just
from Canada, from about 130global jurisdictions, including
islands in the middle of thePacific that don't necessarily

(01:12:58):
have any national affiliation,like some from Antarctica, some
from the high Arctic, like fromliterally all over the globe.
We have representatives fromsome countries that no longer
exist since the agents werecollected, some jurisdictions

(01:13:19):
that we would no longer be ableto access, for example.
So there's a tremendous amountof irreplaceable access to
biodiversity that thiscollection offers, and that's
why I've been so keen on findinga way to maintain it in Canada,
because once it's lost toCanada, once it has to go

(01:13:42):
overseas, it becomes subject tothe whim of whatever government
then is willing to fund it, andthey may decide not to, or they
may not decide to send strainsback to Canada.
In the case of the EuropeanUnion, there are international
agreements that would preventcertain of these materials,

(01:14:02):
based on their country of origin, from coming back to Canada, as
insane as that sounds.
So once it moves away fromCanada, it won't be able to come
back, and that's why I've feltso strongly that we need to find
a way to keep it here.

Speaker 3 (01:14:18):
All right.
Well, james, thanks very muchfor taking the time to be on the
program.
How do people get in touch withyou, or how can they make a
donation, or how they cancontribute or find out more
details about your research, andwhere can they get all this
information from?

Speaker 4 (01:14:33):
Sure research.
And where can they get all thisinformation from Sure?
Well, the biobank website iswwwuamhca and that's got a lot
of information on it and at somepoint shortly I'm going to put
a donation link that carriesback to the university donation
portal to support the biobankthrough there.

(01:14:55):
But that contains a lot ofinformation on what the biobank
is, some of its activities, someof the interesting strains that
the biobank contains.
It's also got a fullypublic-facing, searchable portal
about the public holdings ofthe biobank and photographs and
DNA sequences and all kinds ofthings that scientists would be

(01:15:16):
interested in and maybe evensome non-scientists as well.

Speaker 3 (01:15:20):
Right.
Well, like you said, it was acourse that you took that
inspired you to get interestedand to maintain that, and
sometimes listening to thepodcast will inspire other
individuals to get more involvedand potentially help out as
best they can.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):
Certainly More people need to be interested and know
about fungi.
They need more proponentsbecause they're such interesting
creatures.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
Yep, absolutely Well, James.
I really appreciate you takingthe time to be on our podcast
today, and it's just moreinformation about all those
things that are out there underthe canopy that we can learn
about and hopefully, as scienceand individuals like yourself,
James, get more research doneand be able to find better
things for us in society as awhole.

(01:16:00):
Thanks again for being on theprogram.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
It's been my pleasure , Jerry.
Thanks so much for theinvitation.

Speaker 6 (01:16:25):
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(01:16:48):
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