All of the molecular biology and biomedicine laboratories have been really transformed by the availability of these what we now call genome-wide experiments. The ability to use deep sequencing technology to ask questions about the whole genome at the same time rather than one gene at a time. And so, certainly, that's a big part of what we're doing. But, in addition with the biochemistry and cell biology remain very important to understand mechanism, rather than just to find out the frequency of a particular mutation. Well, I think if you'd ask ten scientists to define big data, you'd probably get ten different definitions. To me, it's something that is bigger than what you can analyze with an Excel spreadsheet for an, for example. And, I think, each year the bar for what is big data probably goes up because last, because as we learn how to handle massive datasets, those no longer seem so big. And then, only ones that are tenfold bigger than that would really seem to be would seem to qualify. But certainly, these genome exper, genome-wide experiments which generate an amount of data which is too vast to ever interpret by just reading the, the code on a, on a computer screen with your own eyes and using your own brain. Those certainly qualify as, as big data. So, I think the, the big data is one, one good example of what BioFrontiers is trying to do. Certainly, you can interrogate these big data systems through collaborations between computer scientists and biological scientists. We think that it's even more exciting to, to identify a few individuals who within their sane head have the ability to think about both coding the, the software that's going to deconvolute these, these questions. And, at the same time, understand the biology. So, we're choosing a few faculty to hire who are able to really are deeply trained in both computer science and biology. Or it could be both physics and biology, chemistry and biology, engineering and biology. And then we have found that they become nodes on an interdisciplinary network. And, they collaborate very broadly and they're particularly valuable collaborators. And, in addition to that, we're trying to train some graduate students in the same way. Which is to have them understand both the, for example, computer science and the biology both in a, in a deep way. I think that the unique feature of the IQ Biology, which stands for Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology, is that we do not bring the students into a department, and then expect them to do collaborative interdisciplinary research. But instead, we bring them in just as a cohort of young scientists who are interested in learning about the connectivity between the disciplines. Whenever there's a new field that is, that, that springs up like microbiome research, in the initial years, a lot of the work is of necessity rather descriptive. It's, it's observation. It's cataloging what is there in of the intestinal microbiome or in a, a soil microbiome or, or living on on plants or, or, or whatever the environment is. But then I think the important next stage, and this is starting to happen in the microbiome research, is to really drill down into mechanism. And this is not going to happen by as you know, just by DNA sequencing alone. And, for example, by having a partnership between, between the genomic approaches and metabolomics, where you can actually identify which small molecules are being produced by certain bacteria. How they are perhaps being in turn chemically transformed by a second species of bacterium to make some product, which then is the real thing that has the health consequence for the person. That's the kind of connectivity that is starting to happen in this field, and that's really what I think the future is going to hold. No, it may not be this simple in many cases, but there could be some cases where for example, the colon cancer case that you mentioned earlier. There's some hints that there may be a particular conversion of a fatty acid by the microbiome which produces a pro-carcinogenic compound. I mean, could it be that simple, in some cases, that we would identify that this whole community of organisms, really the health effect comes down to one small molecule? Which we could either find a way to soak up if it's a toxic molecule, or find a way to introduce if it's a helpful molecule. Maybe it won't be that simple in many cases. And maybe the, the easier approach will be to introduce the correct community of bacteria, which do some complex metabolism, which is good for for human health. So, that's what excites me is the, is this opportunity to get down to to reduce this complexity as much as possible. And see whether, in some cases some surprisingly simple I don't even know if I want to call them therapy. In some cases, it may be lifestyle advice or it may be a, a dietary supplement of some sort. Is really going to be a way of improving human health. We don't know yet how important the microbiome is going to be in medicine. And, it's only by doing research in this area, that we'll ever be able to explore these possibilities.
