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 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

It's just a leftover.

But over time, it got co-opted by evolution to be a signal because it's leaked out.

The bacteria are basically swimming in it, right?

And so if you can evolve a receptor that binds it and sends information into the cell, right, because these molecules were leaking out, the more cells there are, the more of these molecules –

There are, right?

Then you can evolve a signaling system to have information encoded in those.

I mean, that's the guess, right, about how quorum sensing started.

And about being locked in, oh, it is.

Because now we have bacterial genomes.

You know this.

We have the human genome.

We have a zillion genomes, right?

Quorum sensing...

is the norm in the bacterial world.

Like, so when I was first, we were first discovering the first of these quorum sensing, we're like, wow, you know, is this some crazy anomaly of some obscure bacterium?

Well, fast forward 30 years, and we look through these genomes, right?

There are tens of thousands of cases of quorum sensing.

You know, we can see these genes throughout the entire bacterial kingdom domain, right?

And so it's not a one-off.

And so I think that

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