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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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 that light, that photon, the wavelength of it happens to be blue.

And so it is similar to what fireflies are doing.

So fireflies have luciferase and luciferin is the substrate in fireflies, and they carry out this biochemical reaction that photons of light get emitted

when the reaction occurs.

No, that's about sex.

So what's really interesting is that we think that luciferase, the enzyme that makes light, that that evolved twice on Earth, once in the ocean and once on land.

And so there's nothing in common between bacterial and firefly luciferase, except that all luciferase need oxygen as one of the

But yeah, so fireflies are trying to find girlfriends and boyfriends.

They have a timing.

So fireflies emit yellow light, which is what you see at dusk, right?

And so they're trying to find each other, you know, and there's a pattern and they're following that light to be able to mate, right?

Absolutely.

And so I think, so for sure, so we know all of these clinically relevant, globally important pathogenic bacteria, the baddies, that if they don't have quorum sensing, you know, like if we make mutants that either can't talk or can't hear, which we can make, right, they are completely avirulent because their repertoire of

virulence factors, toxins, poisons, things that let them enter into your cells, those are all under quorum sensing control, right?

Because for the reasons we just talked about, you have to have the army do it together to have an effect on the host, whether the host is an animal, a human, or a plant, right?

And so, again, I think the way to generically think about quorum sensing, if a bacterium's gonna give something away to the world,

a toxin or something good, it never gets its own back, you know?

The world is huge and bacteria's poor.

So if I release something, you know, a toxin, it's gone.

And so the only way I, as an individual bacterium, can get the benefit of that toxin is if you do it, right?

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