Apr 4, 2020
Cheese is delicious, and also the product of a complex mixture of microbes.
Different communities of microbes produce the wide variety of
cheeses made around the world. Dr. Rachel Dutton is an Assistant
Professor at the University of California San Diego who studies
cheese microbiomes.
Dr. Dutton talks about how cheese is made, how the cheese
microbiome is a great model for understanding how microbes interact
with each other, how the microbial community determines what type
of cheese is made, how her experience working on a cheese farm
influenced her research, how the long history of cheesemaking
practices gives great insight into microbial interactions, where
the holes in Swiss cheese come from, and how studying the cheese
microbiome has the added benefit of being able to eat your
experiments.
microTalk was pleased to be joined by Dr. Jimmy Ballard (University
of Oklahoma Health Science Center) when this podcast was recorded
at the ASM Microbe 2019 conference in San Francisco, CA.
The microCase for listeners to solve is about Houser Sampson, whose
voracious appetite for sushi causes him to come down with a
mysterious illness.
Participants:
Karl Klose, Ph.D. (UTSA)
Rachel Dutton, Ph.D. (University of California San Diego)
Janakiram Seshu, Ph.D. (UTSA)
Mylea Echazarreta (UTSA)
Jimmy Ballard (OUHSC)