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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

but bioluminescence, like how could biology make light, right?

I mean, we love fireflies, right?

It's so captivating.

And so he was studying luciferase, which is the enzyme that makes light.

And then he is the one that discovered in these bioluminescent marine bacteria that they would grow for a while in a flask and they would make no light.

And then all of a sudden, all the bacteria would turn on light together.

And what was so powerful about that,

is that it made the invisible world visible to the scientist.

He's like, I mean, why don't they make light?

Then all of a sudden they do make light together.

And so it gave us something we could measure.

It gave us a trait we could follow.

And it showed that bacteria were doing something together.

That's how this field started, was because these bacteria made this visible output of quorum sensing.

Now, again, going back to what I said, we know it's the norm.

We have all these ways to measure genes and behaviors and things that we didn't have in the 1970s when Woody Hastings discovered this, but that was the way in.

Yeah, oh yeah, right?

So they have an enzyme that we call luciferase, which when it does its... So there's a little fatty acid, there's like a fat that's the substrate.

And when luciferase does its reaction...

which is just a biochemical reaction, it lets off a photon of light one out of every 20 times.

Showing 441–460 of 763 · page 23 of 39