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

Want me to tell you what we're really working on right now?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, I'll tell you one more story.

So we've been talking about quorum sensing is about bacteria, right?

But what we've learned in the past couple years, and what is the sort of frontier for my lab, right, is that it's not just all about bacteria anymore.

So now we know that the eukaryotes and the viruses...

are participating in these chemical conversations.

Oh, good.

That's good.

Okay, good.

I want you to ask that.

So we'll pretend you asked me that.

I'll act like I'm a gracious guest instead of bossing you around.

The bacteria might not have a boss, but I am bossy.

Anyway, let's see.

So two things.

So for the eukaryotes, we've found now

that like your human gut cells make molecules that are almost identical to these bacterial quorum sensing molecules, right?

And so the bacteria perceive them as quorum sensing molecules.

And so what we think then is, remember, your gut is where a human and most bacteria come in contact.

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