Bonnie Bassler
speaker
763 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Bonnie Bassler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The bacteria really have no clue how many other cells are around.
They're using the buildup of these molecules as a proxy for cell number.
And so if I can anthropomorphize, which you already know I do, they believe, if you will, if these molecules are at high amounts, it must mean there are other cells around, the quorum is there, and if they all change their behavior together, these tasks that they couldn't accomplish when they are
When there are few cells present, they can accomplish when they're together, right?
So the molecules are their words, if you will.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
I think that probably, you know, a gazillion, a billion years ago, whenever this, when quorum sensing evolved, we know these molecules, they're very simple, they're very cheap.
They probably just leaked out.
They were like just byproducts of metabolism.
They leaked out.
The soonest you leak them out of a cell, there is a number component, right?
Because they can build up.
And then a bacterium evolves a receptor, right, that detects that molecule and, you know, and they're off to the races in terms of quorum sensing.
And so, yeah, I think that they probably were leftovers at the beginning, but being able to detect them and the fact that every cell makes its share, that the concentration of these molecules, we call them auto-inducers because they auto-induce the bacteria to do something.
That's what we call them, that those increase in proportion to cell density.
Because of biochemistry, right?
Because of the way they're made.
Do they decay away eventually?
Otherwise, I would think they would just sort of accumulate.
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