Ologies with Alie Ward - Glycobiology (CARBS) with Michelle Dookwah

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Carbohydrates: no longer just for your piehole. Stuff some knowledge into your ears with sugar scientist Michelle Dookwah and learn how your cells use carbs to communicate, the whys behind your winter cravings, the hot goss on the keto diet, and how much sugar you should really be eating. Also: B-movies about biology and the weirdest thing Alie ate today.Follow Michelle Dookwah on Twitter or InstagramMore episode sources & linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramTheme song by Nick Thorburn

You know that person who just cut you off on the highway, that one, that turd behind the wheel. You know malicious YouTube commenters, but also Dolly Parton and your ex-office mates Petch and Chilla, what do all these beings have in common? Effin love carbs, man. Love them. All of us. Walking, breathing dumpsters of bread and fruit and starch and saccharides.

Even if you don't eat many carbs, your cells are still composed of them and you'd be up quite a creek in their absence. Thanks carbs. Hey, hi. It's me. It's Allie Ward. This is Alleges. Hi.

So in this episode, we'll talk about what a carb is and why people are in labs studying them and if they wear lab coats or not and how Harrison Ford is involved. What kind of diet we should eat to feel less like post-holiday marshmallow and which diets are fads. How much sugar is bad for you and why, you know what, it's not your fault that you would risk early death to lick brownie batter from a bowl with your fingers. And also, why does any of this even matter? Now I want to say before we get into this episode, one thing I've gotten some tweets

about recently is a closure to the Feral Audio Network. Also like Allie, what's happening with Alleges? Heads up? Nothing. Alleges hasn't been on Feral Audio since episode one. I left in September. So Alleges continues. So thank you to everyone who has merch or is a patron and to everyone who tells friends

or tweets or subscribes or taps the guy next to you on the subway and is like, you should listen to this. Also thank you to everyone who leaves reviews on iTunes, which helps the podcast stay up in the charts. It's amazing. It's been in like the top 50 or top 20 or top 10 even since we started. So that's crazy. Also, I read all your reviews and I love them.

Do you want to hear a few from this week? I'm going to read you one of my favorite. I'll read you my favorite one. My favorite one this week was by the Joy Sandwich podcast, which is another great podcast I really want to go on. They say, if you want to learn all the things while feeling insignificant and humbled and like a tiny clump of atoms, Alleges is your jam. It's the greatest.

So much learning and sillies and just the best reminder that we are here together on this pale blue dot. Also Livy821 says she honestly wishes she was my best friend. Is that possible? Because that'd be rad. I don't see why not Livy. Consider it done. We do have to get matching tattoos, which we will have to carve with steak knives.

So if you're still up for that, holler at me. Okay. I also want to thank everyone for your patience of the holidays. Episodes were a little more sporadic. I wanted to get glycobiology up last week. I was visiting my parents in the woods and there was all this cool wood to be chopped and I got to help fix a furnace, which ruled and there was a friend's marathon on and you know what?

It was just really nice. So I took the week off. So thank you for your patience. Okay. So on to our guest. Loosen your belts and just unbutton the top, one of your pants. No one cares. Get ready to free base some pixie sticks because we're diving face first into carbs

with a woman who is a graduate student at the University of Georgia at the complex carbohydrate research center, which is a thing. Please feast on the knowledge of glycobiologist, Michelle Ducroix. Yeah. So I'm Michelle Ducroix. Now Michelle is originally from Athens, Georgia, but she did her undergrad in Connecticut where it is very cold and she was checking out schools for graduate research and an advisor at the University of Georgia offered her tour of this really unique crazy research facility

on her campus. She was like, what is this? So he took me on a tour of the building and he's like, we study complex carbohydrates, which is just a very underappreciated macromolecule. It's the underdog. It is. What it really is is so, you know, there's like four macromolecules that make up life. There's nucleic acids, lipids, proteins and carbohydrates.

And people give a lot of attention to the other three obviously like DNA and RNA are like super hot. And that's totally fine. They're super important too. But what a lot of people don't realize is that literally every single cell in the human body, in the animal body, in bodies is covered in a layer of complex carbohydrates. You have to use certain microscopes to really be able to see this very well. But essentially if you think of a tennis ball and the yellow fuzz on the outside looks

a lot like the actual outside of a cell. These carbohydrate chains are sticking out of a part of your cell membranes called the lipid bilayer. It's called that because it's two sheets of back to back fats that help in controlling what comes in and out of your cells and which other cells, your cells, hang out with, etc. But it's not just like a smooth glossy surface. We think of these nice like organized like fluid model of the lipid bilayer, but in the lipid bilayer, bilayer, bilayer, bilayer, bilayer, bilayer.

Lipid bilayer is hard to say. It's hard to say, but it's fun to say. When I was in biology studying bio in high school, I used to get the words lipid bilayer stuck in my head like a song or a grocery list. Like I just bebop around going lipid bilayer, lipid bilayer. It's so good. Their bilayer are actually like proteins and different types of lipids that have complex carbohydrates just jutting off of them.

What do they do? They're really important for cellular communication. Really like what? For the most part. For instance, two proteins that may have or a protein that may have a carbohydrate motif on the outside is what it would be called. That sounds so fancy. I know.

I have a carbohydrate motif. Indeed. In my guest bathroom, we've opted for a carbohydrate motif. If it has a carbohydrate motif on the outside, there could be a neighboring protein that has a carbohydrate binding segment. Those would be called carbohydrate binding proteins. It's a way for two cells to interact with each other. Why do they want to bind?

Why do the cells want to bind? A lot of times it initiates other signaling in the cell. Like what? I am just straight up interrogating this poor woman. For instance, bacteria have a lot of carbohydrates on their cell surface too. This isn't just like a human thing. This is any cell type. Immune cells will actually bind to carbohydrates on the bacteria cell.

That's how they recognize they're like, oh wait, this isn't a human carbohydrate because bacteria express their own types of complex carbohydrates and it's like, wait, this isn't a human and then it will initiate the immune response. Really? Yeah. So it's a huge player in immunology. There's a lot of studies. So at the center that I work out, there's actually several immunologists studying the

carbohydrate binding interactions between pathogens and the host or the human body. So sticking out of a lipid bilayer of cell membranes are like party streamers, if you will, composed of all of these different sugar molecules. Like you know those things in gas stations or oil change places that are like whip around, those weird windsocks that dance around, they're like that but they're made out of sugar. And they can be chunkier too with just a few carbohydrates each. They can be short and squat or they can form these long chains called saccharide chains. They can be like 100 sugars long.

So why are all of your cells and animal cells and bacteria cells wearing these extravagant feather boas made of sugars? What is happening? What's going on? What kind of craziness is this? Well, most of the time they think it's for signaling other cells, probably. I have to admit a lot of the field of glycobiology is figuring out what these carbohydrates do. We don't 100% know for every single case.

How do you see them? Actually, the way I analyze them is using mass spectrometry. Okay. So you shoot light through them and check out a rainbow? Not quite. I have no idea what I'm talking about here. I got mass spectrometry, very confused with spectroscopy, I think, which involves rainbows and light and it looks like the cover of Pink Floyd's 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon,

which then sent me down a path of why did they use that image? And it turns out one of the Pink Floyd album designers saw the image of a prism in a physics textbook and was like, dude, that's dope. Let's use it. Now, remember, light splitting has nothing to do with what Michelle does. She uses mass spectr... No. Mass spectrometry.

Yes. Okay. That involves ions. I wanted a visual for mass spectrometry and the machine just looks like a big Xerox machine or a printer that weighs like 500 pounds. This is how it works. Nothing to do with rainbows. And it shoots them into the instrument and this instrument literally just measures the

mass to how much charge sticks to it, so how many little sodium bits stick to it. And then you can identify them. And then we can identify them based on their mass to charge ratio. What was your first day like in the lab? Oh, wow. My first day. And so I rotated through a lot of labs before I finally settled on one lab. And my first day, I actually knew that this was the lab I was going to join because I'd

just done a rotation in a lab that was filled with guys. And as much as I love sports, like all they did was talk about was football. It was... It drove me crazy. And I walk into this new lab. So on her first day, another grad student walks up and says, oh my God, I love your leggings. Where did they come from? And as much as I hate admitting it, I was just like, this is my home.

I knew I needed somewhere that I could be comfortable and just talk about what I felt like talking about most days. And it was great. But kind of early on in the lab, there were a lot of techniques I needed to learn. I knew nothing about glycobiology. I knew nothing about mass spectrometry. And so it was a pretty steep learning curve. But there are a lot of grad students in my lab, and they were all very, very helpful

in terms of helping me learn the techniques that I needed. But it was overwhelming for a little bit. And I was kind of like, what am I doing here? What kind of leggings were there? I don't know. I had to ask. They must have been like legit leggings. They were actually just like black leggings from like Old Navy, but she was just like,

oh, they don't look like the sad thin kind that when you bend over, you've got problems. So she was like, oh, they look really good. And I was like, cool. Yeah. So did you have to learn how to pipette things and look at things through a microscope? So pipetting and microscopy were actually things that I knew how to do. I did a lot of research in my undergrad and even some in high school. So actually, those were skills that I was pretty good with.

It's a lot of analytical and chemistry techniques that I didn't really know. And then I do a lot of cell culture. So for Michelle's thesis project, she is researching the effects of glycolipids on a disease called salt and pepper syndrome, named such because it causes spots of hyper and hypo pigmentation, as well as seizures and intellectual disability. So it's rare and it's not good. And if you're curious and want to do just some light reading, you can Google this title of a paper.

It's called a mutation in ganglion side biosynthetic enzyme results in salt and pepper syndrome, a neurocutaneous disorder with altered glycolipid and glycoprotein glycolisation. Glycol... Michelle is just low-key working toward understanding it and finding better therapies for it, just like a boss. What were you like as a kid? Did you have microscopes? Did you like science?

Yeah, I was actually really, I guess, lucky in that I was exposed to science and I really liked science at a young age. My dad is a veterinarian and he actually teaches at the UGA Vet School and he would always let me come like hang out in his lab with him and so I learned how to use like a microscope at a pretty young age and I remember like a science or a project one time, he like let me take a bunch of like agar plates and swab bacteria on them and grow bacteria and... What kind of stuff did you grow or what kind of stuff did you swab? Yeah, it was one of those ones where you like wet the Q-tip and swab like the door handle

and people's hands. Honestly, how cute would it be if your veterinarian's daughter asked to swab your hands so she could grow a culture? I would be like, yes, please do and then also take me directly to the hospital because I'm currently in the process of dying because that was fatally adorable. You have killed me with your cuteness. Also, Michelle, thank you for growing up to cure diseases. You were all.

Are there any favorite movies that involve glycobiology? Are there any movies about glycobiology? If there is a movie about glycobiology, yes, it's called Extraordinary Measures. It came out in 2010, I believe. I have to admit, I haven't seen it. It's not on any of the streaming services and I really can't find a copy to watch. Have you not heard of this movie? That makes sense.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it scored a 28% fresh rating, meaning that 72% of critics would have lobbed decayed food at the screen if they had a chance, despite a whole bunch of movie stars being in it. Ouch. What's crazy is it has Harrison Ford and Brendan Frazier. It's about glycobiology. It's about this businessman, I believe, whose two kids are diagnosed with the same disease a disorder, a rare disorder.

It turns out it is what's called a congenital disorder of glycosylation. Any disorder that's caused by problems in making glycoproteins or glycolipids is just called a congenital disorder of glycosylation. It just means a gene involved in glycobiology or glycosylation has been messed up. Glycosylation sounds like I want to drop an album called Glycosylation. It's a cool word. Yeah, no, I agree with that. So in the movie, Brendan Frazier and Kerry Russell's two kids have a disease called

Pompey's disease, which is a real disease. This is based on a real family. He's a pharmaceutical executive. He wants to find out more about it. He wants to find a treatment, and so he drops everything, and he and this one scientist played by Harrison Ford go on a mad race to study this disorder and try to find a cure for it. In the trailer, which is like three minutes long, someone says at different parts, are

you crazy? And then later, are you insane? So they were really, they were like, you know, once isn't enough, let's put it in there again. But yeah, there's this one phrase that like Harrison Ford says, and he's like, this is just what I've heard from other people. He's like, don't you know about glycobiology? And it's like the answer to that for most people is no.

No, I don't know about glycobiology. Like very much negative, no. The majority of the population, unfortunately, but it is really, really important. So sometimes what makes a good article doesn't always make a good movie. That's okay. You try things. You try it. Maybe we need to get that movie out there more.

I don't know. Maybe Netflix should stream it now. I think we should put out a call. If anyone has a copy of this, they need to reach out to you. That would be awesome. I mean, come on. I wanted to see just how elusive this film is, and it turns out you can totally rent it and stream it for like $4 on Amazon, where it enjoys a healthy 4.5 stars.

It is undetermined if glycobiologists are the only ones watching the movie. When you tell people you're a glycobiologist, what's the first question they usually ask you? What is glycobiology? Which I try to give just as a sink. It's the study of complex carbohydrates, but not like the ones I don't study bread. A lot of people are like, oh, so should I eat white bread? And I'm like, I don't know.

Sure. If you like it. Okay. Number one, live your life. Number two, if your life confuses you, as mine does, there's a reason. Now, for years, people have been saying that white bread and refined flowers are the food stuffs of Satan, because there's not enough fiber in them to slow down digestion. You get too much sugar into your blood at once, thus taxing your pancreas and leading

to type 2 diabetes. But a study came out in June 2017 that said, quote, researchers found no overall differences in glycemic control when people ate white bread compared to wholemeal sourdough bread. They apparently found that some people responded better to white bread, others responded better to wholemeal sourdough bread, and the response could be predicted by the types of bacteria living in your gut. Now, hold up. So this was only a week long study with only 20 volunteers.

This is essentially like if at a family reunion, you're like, hey, half of you guys eat white bread, half of you eat wheat, tell me how you feel. Also two of the researchers involved in this study work for a company that, quote, offers to balance your blood sugar with personalized nutrition, with dietary advice based on the results of stool tests. So a couple of the researchers are directly making money off of finding out if gut bacteria helps balance your blood sugar. So if you're confused, that's because sometimes scientific studies can be stretched and interpreted

by us weekly to mean what you want to hear, which is eat whatever you want. Okay. Back to how Michelle handles glycobiology cocktail party talk. And then I just always have to do a quick answer of that, like it's on all of your cells and it's really important for cell signaling in your immune system. Does your business card say glycobiologist? Now you're, you met your husband through glycobiology? No, actually.

So we both studied glycobiology. My husband and I actually met in high school in Athens. Oh. Yeah. We started dating our senior year of high school. And then we both went away for college. I was at Yale in Connecticut. Meanwhile, her high school sweetheart and future husband was at Northeastern in Boston, which

is about two hours away from each other. Did that suck? It was manageable. In the end, when it came to picking at grad school, they both liked Georgia. They both happened to pick glycobiology, although his main focus isn't on animal cell walls. It's researching and generating better plants for biofuels. Can you imagine anything more trendy than a car that runs on avocado? It would be amazing.

Do you guys talk about glycobiology a lot? So we do. We talk through each other's problems a lot. Although like I have to admit, like I don't know tons about plants and he doesn't know tons about like neurological disorders. So do she and her husband ever cut carbs, gasp, pearl clutch, smelling salts? So we never do like the low carb, high fat kind of set up like the keto diet. Like the Atkins.

Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of that. You may have heard a lot about the keto diet lately as this little family, little family billionaires called the Kardashians. And also this lady named Beyonce and all these tech CEO, air quote, bio hackers have been swearing by it, especially the last few months. So is it new? No.

It was developed in the 1920s as a remedy for epilepsy and it's still used today to control seizures. So what is the ketogenic diet? How is it different from low carb and Atkins and what is the deal? What is the deal? So keto is very low carb, less than 50 grams of carbs a day, sometimes lower than 20 grams of carbs a day, not just sugar, just carbs in general. So your body stores carbohydrates in the form of glycogen for fuel.

And we take that, we scroll it away in the liver and your muscle tissue. And when you cut carbs and don't replace those backup stores, you run out of glycogen and your body goes into ketosis. So that is when you are out of glycogen. So you break down fats into fatty acids and ketone bodies that are used for fuel for the body and for the brain. So you kind of switch over to a different fuel system. Now a few things, each gram of glycogen in your body stores is bound to some experts

say three to four grams of water. So when you use up those stores, you lose a bit of water weight super fast, which is partly why if you've ever been on a low carb diet for like, I don't know, a television job. And then once it's wrapped, you've like, I don't know, gone to little Italy and eaten a trough of gnocchi, two baskets of bread and tiramisu alone, such that the waiter seems to want to ask if you've just gotten out of prison, the next day or so, you'll be like 10 pounds heavier on the scale and your denim skirt won't zip in 2003.

Just saying each glycogen shows up to your muscle party with an entourage of like three or four more water molecules. So when you get rid of the glycogen, you get rid of some water too. Low carb diets are helpful for quickly losing water weight for sure. And then from there, eating for keto is about 65% fat, 35% protein and 5% carbs. Fat is said to keep your body burning your fat stores and also promoting something called autophagy, which is Greek for eating yourself. Your body just casually eating itself, like a hungry goat going around, scanning the cupboards,

gobbling up screwed up cells and weird bits of scar tissue and extra cancer mess ups and recycling the parts. So that's another reason why people like the keto diet is you burn fat really quickly when you switch to fat burning ketosis and possibly it can be healthier in other ways. Now there's some controversy about autophagy and its role in cancer. On one hand, it can grab tumors and nip them in the bud, but in later stages it could promote tumors spreading. I do not have the answers for you here, but Dr. Yoshinori Oshumi is on the case.

He just won the Nobel Prize in 2016 for his work on autophagy. Google that. So, you thought you were just going to learn about carbohydrates and how to make your pants button and now you have all kinds of dirt on glycogen and fatty acids and cancer and rare diseases and how much in yaki I can eat in a sitting, which is a lot. By the way, if you're like, where is the Atkins diet and all this? The low carb one where I just eat bacon sandwiches with slabs of cheese as the bread and then I eat a mayonnaise milkshake.

That promotes ketosis too, but it's got some stages in terms of carbohydrate levels and the keto diet is a little more exact and less like go forth and drink queso, my children. I will say I have friends on the keto diet who absolutely love it and say they've never felt better and have shed a ton of weight. So you're mileage may vary. Do your research ahead of time. Side note, if you're trying to get healthier in the new year and lose weight and opt for low carbs, it is best to do it with whole foods, cut out the diet drinks and diet foods,

which can mess with your insulin levels and make you hungrier also. Now if you see sugar alcohols on a label, the best way to consume that is by building a large bonfire, throwing the item onto the bonfire and then running very far in the other direction. Unless you're okay passing undigestible molecules into your large intestine to ferment and cause gastrointestinal distress on parallel with drinking from a puddle in Calcutta, which is what some sugar-free diet foods that have sugar alcohols like mannitol can do. So Google sugar-free gummy bears plus Amazon reviews, settle in for what sounds like war

journalism from the front lines of a toilet. I'll give you an example. Don't eat more than 15 in a sitting unless you are trying to power wash your intestines. The reviews are so good, please find them. If you're thinking of going low carb, you're now armed with some vital information. I'm very, very, very much not a doctor, but as a person who eats desserts for work and has to wear an elastic girdle under some of my clothes, I can tell you in a literal pinch, I just eat protein and vegetables.

I skip the grains, drink a lot of water, say no to diet sodas, no sugar. That usually helps when I start to look like a walking cautionary tale or like a 1990s rocker mugshot. So anyway, that's my advice. Also don't sue me. Anyway, it's really, we've just found like cutting out certain carbs can really help manage calories well. So instead of doing a sandwich for lunch, if you do a salad, like you've saved 200 calories

because you don't eat the bread. So we'll do stuff like that a lot. And yeah, my family cheeses me all the time about it. It's like, I know I study carbs, but I'm also trying to stay in shape in grad school. You gain a lot of weight. But there's also like an upper limit of how many carbs is a good amount of carbs properly, right? Of course.

Yes, of course. Like you get carbs from things other than bread. Yeah. And while, you know, being a glycobiologist, I can say like you need carbohydrates to survive, obviously. You don't, it doesn't mean you have to eat like 16 pieces of bread. You're getting, I mean, like I said, plants are made up of carbs. So I mean, eat a vegetable and you'll be fine.

Eat a vegetable. I have questions. Yes. From our listeners. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do?

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So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Questions. Laura wants to know what your favorite sugary snack is. My favorite sugary snack. Oh, that's our cupcakes are kind of the top two for me. Yeah. And those have complex and simple carbohydrates.

Those are mostly simple carbohydrates. And what is the difference between a complex and a simple carbohydrate? So a simple sugar, a little bit complicated to explain. So like glucose, you know, of in like sugar, it makes up like, it's a part of sucrose that is the sugar that we eat. And it also, it, all that means is it's a, it's a single sugar molecule. Like glucose is a single sugar molecule. Well, there's different types of sugar molecules.

There's also one called galactose and fucose. And those connect together. They make multiple sugar chains. And that's when they get complex is when you get multiples of them. This is a really dumb question. But why are simple carbohydrates sweet and complex carbohydrates with more sugar in them are less sweet? Oh, so that's just like a characteristic of, of like the sugar.

So like glucose itself is sweet, but then there's another sugar called mannose that's like bitter. So the taste is just a characteristic of different types of sugars. I tried to look this up and explain it and I found a sentence that says, stepwise modification at each chiral center around the sugar ring allows the sapid functions in these molecules. Anyway, some sugars are bitter, some are sweet. That's all I got for you. I'm sure that to our body is like more sugar means more fat means I lived through the winter.

Yeah, I'm sure there's evolutionary aspects of it. Yeah. Okay. Carbs in the winter. Why do we eat them? Well, some people think that when the days start getting shorter and there's less light, we know winter is coming. And to survive the cold, you need feasts and mead and biscuits and cookies your neighbor

made. Now, other behavioral psychologists say it's just crimes of opportunity. The holidays mean more gatherings, gatherings mean cheese platters and crackers and a bunch of caramel corn that you're going to crack your teeth on, but you don't even care. I like the theory that everyone gets a case of the sad, seasonal affective disorder, a mild form of depression that your grandma probably calls the winter blues. Depression can cause carbohydrate cravings because carbohydrates promote the production of serotonin, which is a buzzy, happy, warm, feel good chemical in your brains.

Either way, let's chalk it up to good old fashioned messed up self medication that brings us temporary joy and future misery. I don't know how to end this aside. I don't... Oh, you know what? I'm just going to tell you that the largest loaf of bread ever made was baked by a Brazilian man in 2008 and it weighed 3,400 pounds or 1,500 kilograms. It's one of a long ass loaf pan.

It winds back and forth and the photos of its production before they cooked it look like an albino anaconda waiting in line at Disneyland. It's huge. Moving on. Lucy wants to know, are carbohydrates your favorite organic compound? Yeah? Yeah? Um, Angela wants to know, will there ever be a cure for type one diabetes?

Um, I'm optimistic about that one and that actually, that is a disease that a lab at the CCRC and actually in general within glycobiology, there's a lot of focus on it actually. Yeah, I'm pretty optimistic about a treatment for that. There's a lot of labs focusing on that and they make a lot of progress. I think it's just in the world of research, things take time unfortunately. She also wants to know, what impact do sugars and glycans have on gut bacteria, if any? Ooh, a lot. Yes, actually.

So your gut bacteria, so like I said, bacteria express their own types of sugars too. And they'll have a different combination of complex sugars on their surface compared to our surface, our cell surfaces, our cell surface, sorry. Say that 10 times fast. And the sugars that our body makes interact with the bacteria, like the bacteria will have their own carbohydrate binding proteins and so that's actually a really hot area of research right now. Is that gut biome?

Oh yeah. So you have these kind of glycan streamers that are jutting off of a cell surface and those are interacting with your good and bad gut bacteria to be like, who are you? What are you doing here? Exactly. Oh, so you are kind of, or some glycobiologists are studying how your cells interact with all the bacteria. With good or bad bacteria, exactly.

And even understanding, I mean, even just the basic understanding of like why a bad bacteria is bad, like how come the bad bacteria infects your cell and the good bacteria don't necessarily. And that communication could be facilitated through glycans. It could be that the good bacteria have certain glycans that the cell recognize and it's like, oh, never mind, this is okay. And then the bad bacteria express a different combination of glycans and your cell is like, whoa, no, you don't belong here.

Like I'm calling in backup pretty much, yeah. I wonder if there's any just like kind of medium bacteria that they're like, I'm not really a dick. I mean, I'm not that nice either. I'm just kind of a medium. Maybe. There could be some that definitely are like a mild or just like, I'm going to chill here and you're never alone.

This is a nice dark environment. It's a nice dark, stinky environment. Yeah. I promise you that one day I will have a microbiologist on to talk about the importance of the gut biome. It is, it's all I want. If you are one of those, just slide in my DMs. I would love to talk about our stinky guts.

Jen wants to know what is the most interesting thing about sugar on a molecular level? What does it look like? So they're all like these little six or five-membered rings. So if you think back to like chemistry class, they're like little rings of carbon. So a sugar is a glycan, just all synonymous, yeah. And it's really interesting how just like a very small change means it's a different sugar and therefore it has a different property. Like everything from glucose being sweet to mannose being bitter, like those two structures

are actually really similar. But like one little change gives it a whole different characteristic. And that's kind of like the beauty of anything on a molecular level is just that like all the diversity, all the different cell type, like everything that makes the world that we see it is like just small molecular changes that add up. If that makes sense. I know that sounds really dumb. No.

Does that ever trip you out from like a what is life standpoint at all? All the time. Really? Yeah. Do you think about chemistry just when you're driving around, when you're just eating, when you're watching a movie? No. I'm definitely, I like thinking about science, but I can also very easily turn that off and

move on with my life. You're like, I can compartmentalize it. Sarah wants to know, is it frustrating that our society has demonized sugar since glycans are so important to everything? Yeah, that's it. It's actually a really interesting way to think about it because as a glycobiologist, I definitely differentiate like the sugar we eat from the sugar on our cell surfaces. So I see that distinction, but I totally realize that like nobody else would see that distinction.

And so they're like, ooh, sugar's bad. One really, it's pretty important. How much sugar should we eat? This is a good question. I asked the American Heart Association. They recommend no more than around 30 grams of sugar a day, particularly sugar. If you're like, do I even eat that? Probably not.

Well, the average American consumes 82 grams of sugar every day. This roughly 66 pounds of added sugar consumed each year per person. That's so much sugar. So I found a site run by UCSF med school. It's called Sugar Science. They say, quote, using brain scanning technology scientists at the US National Institute on Drug Abuse were among the first to show that sugar causes changes in people's brains, similar to those in people addicted to drugs such as cocaine and alcohol.

These changes are linked to a heightened craving for more sugar. Now UCSF has this incredible team of scientists. They study sugar in the diet, its role in human health, and they have a Meet the Scientist page. It lists epidemiologists, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, nutritional biologists, but no glycobiologists. Because the glycobiologists are really doing work at the cellular level with sugars and saccharides to find how cells use them to communicate and to help find cures for rare diseases, which is why Michelle doesn't have a ton of interest in fad diets.

And I was up googling before and after pics, Kardashian, keto, longer than I really needed to be. Let's be honest. I really completed my research and then I just kept looking. Well, Allison wanted to know how is glycobiology helping with developments of the skin and aging? And she also notes, got this from Wikipedia. Yes.

Okay. So there is a particular complex carbohydrate chain called hyaluronic acid. And you will see that on a lot of your beauty products. Yes. I think I've... In my moisturizer. Yes, indeed. So essentially it is a long chain of sugars, a particular combination of sugars that retains

water really well. So it attracts water and water molecules stick to it and it plumps up with... I think it can one chain, can hold 100 times its own volume, its own mass in water. Oh, wow. Yeah. So what is your least favorite thing about glycobiology? What really chaps your hide? It's weird because it's a combination of a thing I like about it and a thing I don't

like about it. Like it's a growing field, but it's still a fairly small field. And so kind of everybody knows, everybody and everybody knows, everybody's research. It has its pluses because for instance, there's really only like one real textbook, like really good textbook for glycobiology called The Essentials of Glycobiology. And so it's a very close like community, which is nice. And it does mean anytime like two professors have like a beef or something, like your professor might be like, no, don't go postdoc in that person's lab because they suck.

And so it's got the same issue of any close-knit community is that any of the problems kind of get exacerbated. It also means like our professional society meetings, for instance, when you go to like these big conferences, ours is pretty small. There's like 400 people compared to like Society for Neuroscience is like 40,000 people, you know, Society for Glycobiology is tiny. Does that make you feel elite though? Do you feel like you're a member of a small cool club?

I never really thought of it that way. I'm not really into elitism. So I don't really know. Like, no, it gives it a nice like family aspect, but it just doesn't give quite as much room for like networking and branching out. There may not be many glycobiologists, but Michelle says it's a really good skill set. It's starting to get some attention. The pharmaceutical industry is really picking up on it and there's a lot of room for using

carbohydrates and their role in cell signaling for vaccine development. But still, I mean, I had to admit that I was stoked. I kind of fangirled when I met her and she said she's a glycobiologist. I know when I met you, I was like, I'm not going to encounter another glycobiologist for probably ever. So I was like, excuse me, can I pull you into this room? There you go. So what is her very, very, very favorite thing?

Like what gives you butterflies makes you like get excited about getting into the lab or just doing the work you do. What do you love? For me personally, it's thinking about it in a way to understand like how this is going to benefit the communities and in particular these communities that are suffering from like really rare congenital disorders of like oscillations. And that makes me really excited. Do you want glycobiology to become a bigger thing?

I do. As much as I say, like the close knit family, like I still want to see it become a common term. I want, you know, undergraduates to learn about it in science classes. I want pharmaceutical industries to like realize it's important and important and like hire more and do more of its own research in glycobiology. Have you considered shirts that say glycobiology is pretty sweet? She had not.

She did get memed by a friend and it's just a photo of her in glasses in the lab with the all caps proclamation. Glycobiology is cool. I will post this on the allergies Instagram because I feel it needs to be seen. Do you have to wear lab coats? I do not. And like nothing's going to like infect me in my lab. So I don't worry too much about it.

But you could probably get so much respect at Starbucks if you waltzed in with a lab coat. You should just consider it. They're really like, they're kind of hot though. They're like not a very breathable material. Oh, I thought you meant like the people look hot in them and like, yeah, people look great in a lab coat. Nah, you get out like hot and uncomfortable.

It's only nice because it has pockets and if you're not wearing like if you're wearing leggings and a t-shirt and you don't have pockets, like the lab coat is clutch. The lab coat is clutch. Words to live by with Michelle Duquois. Also please someone start that as a meme. Thank you very much. Thank you so, so much for coming on. I'm so glad.

I'm walking away with so with a good grip on what glycobiology is. I had no idea what it was yesterday. I'm glad. That actually makes me really happy. Yay, go. Science communication. You did it. So next time you stare lovingly into a PETA pocket or, or you banish your cereal to a

locked file cabinet in the basement, just remember that your cells are like kooche balls. They're all crazy with carbs on their surface and they're all talking to each other and waging wars on invaders and you're just like eating an apple on a bench wondering if you should get an asymmetrical haircut this year. I say go for it. To follow Michelle Duquois, she's at MT Duquois on Twitter and Instagram and oligies is oligies on Twitter and Instagram and I'm Ali Ward on both. If you want to find out what topics are coming up next and you want to submit questions to

our oligists, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash oligies. You can support with a dollar an episode, you can do 25 bucks a month, you can even do one dollar a month, 25 cents an episode. Let's this show continue running, allowing me to pay the amazing Stephen Ray Morris for editing and engineering, to pay for equipment, to pay for web hosting. Buying merch also supports the show and we have a ton up at oligiesmerch.com including individual pins that are so cute for $8 each. If you have any oligies or oligists you want to hear about, tweet me about them, send me

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Oh, and as for this week's end of show secret, right before I started recording this, I ate a slice of apple and I realized I'm currently digesting half of the sticker. I ate the slice of apple, I looked and I realized the other half of the sticker was still on the part of the apple I had not in. I ate the sticker. So if I die, it's because of my addiction to fructose. In my absence, please, ask smart people dumb questions because they love it. Okay, bye-bye.