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
In these systems, so that's a dual function molecule, right?
Because in these systems, remember, these bacteria mostly don't live in test tubes in Princeton, New Jersey, you know, in these pristine environments, right?
They live out in the wild west.
And so there is, in these quorum sensing systems, there is all kinds of attempted and cheating and free riding and eavesdropping because like the one good thing to do is I make
the molecule but i don't turn on the genes that are really expensive which are all the public goods in the task right or i you my competitor make a molecule that you're trying to count your cell numbers and i your competitor make an enzyme that i clip that molecule in half so you're trying to count and i'm over here in the dirt trying to make you mute because right and so we know all kinds of that where where different species that live together you know make ag make
And so somehow there's got to be little itty-bitty policemen around that are, you know, making a punishment for cheating, right?
And so people are now trying to figure out how all of that can possibly work, you know, outside of an academic lab, you know, where these creatures are actually living together independently.
each with their own priorities that may not match.
First, information theory, like how much information is encoded in these, like how many bits of it, and game theory.
And also like evolution, like these ideas of these evolutionary biologists, which I am not,
Think about when you have these population crashes or tragedy of the commons where you're making public goods.
Bacteria are really great to study those kinds of things because you can do it on a peachy plate.
You can actually do a real experiment.
It's not just some public park that goes to heck because nobody's in charge of keeping it.
I don't know if that's making sense.
But yeah, I think the physicists have loved this.
Because it has the features that they like to think about, usually about humans, but in fact,
For sure, and I think another reason that, and again, this goes back to you asked me, how'd you work on bacteria, that's so attractive
about thinking about those kinds of big questions you know how did cooperation and cheating and what does it take and what are the rules you know evolve on earth what's great about bacteria is that we can make mutants right you can't do that with humans right so we can make a cheater right you're not supposed to yes okay but we can make a bacterium that only makes the molecule but doesn't turn on the traits we can make a guy that's deaf right that can't detect them and we can then ask in a real experiment
Who's harmed?
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