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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You can't even see them without a microscope.
Yet they do all these terrible things on Earth, like make us and animals and plants sick.
But they also do all these miraculous things on earth, like you just alluded to, like they live in and on us and they keep us alive.
They keep plants alive.
They clean up the environment.
They do all these fantastic and terrible things.
And so those are facts.
And what my group is always interested in is how can they manage to do that?
They're so tiny, yet they have this remarkable, you know,
power and so what we've shown is that the way bacteria get their power is that they work in groups and they carry out tasks as collectives as teams that they could never accomplish if they acted alone because individually they're too small to make a difference but if they have used collective behaviors and they all do things in synchrony they can accomplish tasks that they never could otherwise
And so the way they manage to do that is to communicate with chemicals so that they know one another is there.
And so we call this process of bacterial communication in group behavior quorum sensing.
And I guess I'll just – I'll tell you how it works.
So the way it works is – Actually, you know what?
Yeah.
Okay.
I wasn't actually there, but they arrived.
They evolved on Earth.
After oxygen, right?
So they have been on this earth for billions of years, like four billion years.
Showing 61–80 of 763 · page 4 of 39
← Previous
Next →