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

So as far as we know, they are dedicated signal molecules in that the bacteria can't eat them.

I want to be careful with this.

They don't eat them.

They don't grow on them.

They don't have other functions.

But so that's what we think.

They are dedicated quorum sensing signal molecules.

They are now for counting.

Now, it could be that there's lots of bacteria that we haven't studied that maybe they have multiple functions or they're still just leftovers and nobody's figured out to eavesdrop on those.

But for sure, in some ways, so the thing you might be getting to, there's cheating and free riding and trickery.

And so, for example, when you ask me, do they do anything?

So there are examples of

Where one species of bacteria makes one of these autoinducers, a molecule that it and its kin tune into, and they say, let's do collective behaviors, right?

When it builds up to the threshold.

But other bacteria, if they tune into it, it's actually an antibiotic, so it kills them, right?

So, right?

And like, so...

So that's just based on the structure of the molecule, that it's deadly, it's toxic to one bacterium, but not to another, right?

But you can imagine that that's a really good molecule to make because you can kill your competitors, right?

Because there's a lot, there's all kinds of,

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