Sometimes there is truth behind old legends… and some of them involve #AwesomeMicrobes! 🦠 Are you ready for another time travel? ⌛ Hold on tight, here’s our #BactToTheFuture section! 
Welcome to Tenessee, US! We are on the night of April the 7th, 1862, in the middle of the American Civil War. The Battle of Shiloh just happened and the battlefield is crowded with wounded soldiers waiting for the doctors to arrive 👨⚕️
The soldiers have been lying on the cold mud for almost a day when some of them notice something strange: their wounds are glowing with an eerie blue light.
Once they are taken to field hospitals, doctors realise that the troops with glowing wounds are more likely to survive and to get better faster ⛑
For this reason, at that moment the mysterious blue light was dubbed “Angel’s Glow and quickly became a common legend from the US Civil War 📖
Let’s make a leap forward! In 2001, 17-year-old Bill Martin and his mom Phyllis visited the Shiloh battlefield with his family and heard the legend of Angel’s Glow 🤔
Phyllis happened to be a microbiologist who had studied a soil bacterium called Photorhabdus luminescens. This microbe is bioluminescent: it is able to give off a pale blue light 🦠
The bacterial glow matched the soldier’s description… but was it present in that battlefield? Bill teamed up with his friend Jonathan Curtis and discovered that P. luminiscens live inside tiny parasitic worms that dwell in the Shiloh fields! 💡
These worms burrow into insect larvae and then vomit up the #bacteria 🦠 Microbes release in the host chemicals that kill other microorganisms to rid off possible competitors 🧨
This is the reason why soldiers that displayed the Angel’s Glow were more likely to survive! 📈Without trying, the glowing bacteria “cleaned up” their wounds, reducing their chances of suffering a deadly infection ✔
Everything matched... except for a detail: P. luminescens can’t survive at human body temperature! How could microbes stay at the soldier’s wounds then?
The reason for this lies in the soldier’s situation. They had to spend the night on a wet muddy field waiting for doctors, and probably their body temperatures dropped enough to allow the bacteria to thrive on them! 🦠❄
These #AwesomeMicrobes turned out to be behind an old legend of a 19th-century war 🦠🔙 It took 139 years, the curiosity of two teenagers and a bright microbiologist to puzzle out the mystery!
