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

So they're eavesdroppers.

So now we get that this, so this is what my lab, what we're interested, we're not so interested in discovering the next quorum sensing system.

We're very interested in this idea of quorum sensing spanning from eukaryotes to bacteria to viruses.

And like viruses, they're not even,

They're more different than viruses.

Little machines, yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, I think that's been really, really fun.

And then, of course, because of that, we can trick these viruses and make phage therapies that could be useful by getting them to kill or not kill on demand.

But anyway, that's pretty fun for us is that these viruses are tuned in.

And afterwards, again, going back to something we said before, afterwards, people have studied phage.

Phage, bacterial viruses, that founded the molecular biology field.

That's what scientists were working on.

They were working on bacteria and phages.

So that's like 80 years ago.

And so now we've discovered that phages tune into quorum sensing.

And then afterwards you think, well, of course they did.

It only makes sense to kill the host when they're, you know, a phage needs more victims, right?

So of course they, you know, and of course I think I spent my whole life just going like, shouldn't we have figured that out sooner?

Right?

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