Bonnie Bassler

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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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

And so not only are the bacteria measuring the buildup of these molecules, they're actually measuring the ratios of these molecules when they're in these consortia with lots of different species present.

And so what we think they're doing, they're asking, first, how many bacteria are here?

Then they're asking, who are they?

Is it me and my kin or is it the enemy?

And then they actually change their behaviors based on who's in the majority and who's in the minority.

So like when you and your kin, your siblings, you know, are all together, the bacteria make all these public goods.

They release all these goodies.

Everybody shares in this largesse and they all succeed together.

But like when they're around their enemies, sometimes they flee or sometimes they try to kill the other guy.

They make antibiotics that kill off their competitors.

And so they do different things.

So what we think now is that these molecules encode something about the number.

of cells that are present, but also something about how closely or distantly I am related to my neighbor, right?

So there's a lot of information in these little molecules, right?

And then I guess I should have said the kinds of behaviors, I didn't talk about that, that I think your audience is already inferring this, the kinds of behaviors that are controlled by quorum sensing are, as we've discussed, ones that it takes lots of bacteria to make the behavior successful.

So let's go back to the traditional one,

So when a harmful bacterium or a few of them get in me or you, if a couple bacteria dribbled out a few molecules of toxins, nothing would happen to me, right?

But if they wait and they count themselves and they recognize when they have the right number, that if they all launch their toxins together, they can overwhelm my immune defenses and make a productive infection.

The same thing goes for all these good things, like when they're making us our vitamins and they're making us all these products that we need in the microbiome.

You get it.

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