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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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

It can just be dormant and be passed down through generations.

So every time the bacteria divides, the daughter cell is infected, right, by the phage.

Or the phage can replicate like crazy, make many more of itself, kill its current host, and go infect other cells, right?

So we call the first, the dormancy, that's called lysogeny or lysis.

So when a virus gets into a bacterium, it's got to decide, lysogeny, dormancy, or lysis.

It's got to choose one or the other, and they can switch between.

So you can have a lysogen that's gone down many, many generations, and all of a sudden it says, that's it, I'm out, and it can go into lytic mode.

So both ways...

The virus wants to just infect cells, right?

So you can do one by one by one, you know, like by being a lysogen, every daughter cell is automatically infected, or you can make lots of different phage particles and try to infect naive cells that are in the population.

Okay, so if the phage decides the second, like I'm going to lyse my current host, make more of myself, and then I'm going to spread and try to infect...

other cells if there's no other cells there to infect that phage is a goner right so when's a good time to switch to choose yes right so when's a good time to do

Well, it's when there's lots of other bacterial cells around.

So if you pop out, you and your, all these virus particles that you made, if you pop out of that current house and you kill it, you want to maximally transfer the next cell.

So what we've found now is these bacterial viruses have captured or evolved

quorum-sensing receptors.

So what they do is as the host bacteria are growing, they're releasing these autoinducer molecules, the viruses are eavesdropping.

They're surveilling the quorum-sensing molecules, right?

And then they recognize when there's lots of host cells around, and then that quorum-sensing turns on the decision to switch from being dormant to go lytic.

So they only make viruses, they only kill their host cells when there's lots of other hosts in the environment to infect.

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