Matthias Eberl
Professional profile at Cardiff University
What is your favourite bacterium?
Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis.
No joke, this species really exists!
A rod-shaped brownish slime bacterium found in the soil. It lives as predator and hunts down other microbes in 'wolf packs' and kills them, feeding off the content released from the dying prey.
First isolated near the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch on the island of Anglesey in North Wales, from where it got its name.
It has the longest scientific name of any living or fossil organism.
Why do you do what you do?
Because I love science!
As a child what did you want to be when you grew up?
A pilot.
But then at some point in high school I fell in love with science, first chemistry and later biology (despite having had a pretty horrible biology teacher). And by the time I was invited for an interview at Lufthansa I had already learned about Dicrocoelium dendriticum in my first month at university - the lancet liver fluke, a tiny worm that lives in sheep.
The larvae of this parasite infect small snails that feed on sheep poo; a second generation of larvae is then excreted with the snail slime and infects ants. Inside the ant, the parasite larva does something truly amazing. Namely, it reprograms the ant's brain so that instead of seeking shelter and returning to their colony for the night (like what a normal ant would want to do) the ant climbs up a blade of grass and sits at its top, waiting to be eaten by a sheep - where the larva then matures to adulthood and thereby completes the parasite's life cycle.
I was hooked by this story and decided to study pathogens and how our body fights them for the rest of my life! The rest is history. In the words of Gilderoy Lockhart, Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: “For full details, see my published works.”
The life cycle of Dicrocoelium dendriticum. Picture by Meghan Petrucci, taken from this page here.
Tell us a little known interesting fact about you.
I have been playing piano since the age of six.
By now, I have already outlived the composers and pianists Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Carl Maria von Weber, Henry Purcell, Vincenzo Bellini, Georges Bizet, Carl Tausig and Alexander Scriabin who all died in their 30s and 40s from complications related to microbial infections - and all of whom could have been saved with modern antibiotics had they been available at that time.
What is your secret ambition?
To reach the end of my to do list.