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- Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria use a chemical language to coordinate and mount attacks, which could pave the way for new, more potent medicines.
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Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.
- 18 min
Jun 14, 2012 · Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defence and mount attacks. The find has stunning...
In this Narrative, I will try to convince you that bacteria can “talk” to each other, that they are multilingual, that they act together in coordinated groups, and that these capabilities give bacteria their awesome power. Bacteria communicate with one another—not with words but with chemicals.
Feb 9, 2013 · TED-Ed. 19.5M subscribers. Subscribed. 8.5K. 587K views 11 years ago. View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-bacteri... Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria...
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NOVA: If I wanted to find lots of bacteria, where should I look?
Bonnie Bassler: You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere. Your body is covered with bacteria. You have 1010 bacterial cells in your gut. You only have 109human cells making up your whole body. So there are 10 times more bacterial cells in you, or on you, than human cells. By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by number...
It seems like we only notice the bacteria on our teeth.
Of course. You get up in the morning, and your teeth are covered with those little "sweaters." Well, those sweaters are what we call a bacterial biofilm. Every morning, there are over 600 species of bacteria on your teeth. And they are arranged in a beautiful (I think [laughs]) architected community. And it turns out that only the first couple of those 600 species have the proteins that allow them to stick to your teeth. They're not the ones that can digest the enamel and give you a cavity. T...
So we're all swarming with bacteria, and that's generally okay.
Most bacteria aren't bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you're breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don't get sick. That's because your immune system evolved specifically to see bacteria and to do surveillance: to tell the bad guys from the good guys, and to get rid of the bad ones. And it's rare that it doesn't work. But those are the cases you think about.
Can you very broadly describe your research?
In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.
So, step-by-step, how does this communication among bacteria work?
The process is called quorum sensing. It's a fancy name for bacteria communicating with chemical "words" and working in groups. Bacteria are these single-celled organisms. They're one cell, they have no nucleus, they just have one piece of DNA inside them, and so they're the simplest forms of life. And the way bacteria reproduce is they just eat and grow, and then they pinch themselves in half and become two. So they're not having sex; they're just dividing in half and making exact replicas o...
Can you give an example?
The best example of this is in virulence—when bacteria make us sick. When you ingest a few bacteria, the worst thing the bacteria can do for themselves is to start releasing toxins, the things that really make you sick, because those are huge red flags to your immune system. So what the bacteria do instead is they wait. And they start dividing and making and releasing these small quorum-sensing molecules. And then, when they finally recognize that there are enough of them around, now if every...
Tell me about the glowing bacteria you work with.
It's a harmless marine bacterium named Vibrio harveyi, after E. Newton Harvey, who discovered it off the coast of Boston. It's just a generic bacterium from the ocean, but it has this amazing trait: it makes bioluminescence. It makes light in a similar way that fireflies make light. And this glowing, and hundreds of other traits in Vibrio harveyi, are controlled by quorum sensing.
Glowing in the dark seems pretty magical. How do the bacteria do it?
They make enzymes that produce photons of beautiful blue light. We think it's special, but it's not that special in the ocean; almost everything in the ocean either makes its own light or uses someone else's. In the ocean, you don't have to go very deep before it's pitch-black. And so using and manipulating processes with light is a huge deal.
So did you initially start studying this bacterium to understand lightmaking?
No. Everybody always thought I wanted to understand bioluminescence. This was when Mike Silverman and I were working together. [Editor's note: From 1990 to 1994, Bassler was a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Scientist in geneticist Michael Silverman's lab at the The Agouron Institute in La Jolla, California.] We never, at some level, cared about bioluminescence. We always wanted to understand how cells talk. We were using the light as a very convenient, visual readout of the cells' talk...
And now it seems that other bacteria can do this "talking," right?
What's become clear in the last decade is that all bacteria talk to each other. Bacteria are chattering like crazy. Once quorum sensing genes were found in bacteria that people think are important—like pathogens—more and more people started entering the field. Now hundreds and hundreds of labs work on quorum sensing. We now realize that the way we all used to think of and study these bacteria—as these asocial, reclusive, shy organisms—is completely wrong. This isn't how they're living out in...
Of all the different discoveries your lab has made, which one are you the most proud of?
That changes as time goes by, because I'm very maternal about those kids in my lab. I mean, science is done by children—by 20-to-30-year-olds. These kids are responsible for changing how we think about the world. But I guess the thing that my lab is most known for is showing that bacteria can communicate between species. We found this universal molecule and the gene that makes it. We know what it is, we know how it works, and we now know how the bacteria, at least at first blush, talk between...
Is there an analogy between how bacteria "talk" and how we use language?
You can think of the molecules that bacteria make as words, or languages. And we're starting to think that bacteria are multilingual. So they have a language that's, say, English; they have their own molecule that they talk to each other with. And another species of bacteria, they're the French, and they have their own molecule. But then there's a language, and you can think of it like Esperanto, or the trade language of bacteria. This Esperanto molecule everybody understands, and it makes th...
Now for the inevitable, "what-practical-applications-will-come-of-this?" question. Can we interfere with their communication in ways that will help us?
The question is, can we control quorum sensing? Hopefully, the answer is yes. We understand that bacteria control virulence as a group, as a function of quorum sensing. We know that different species of bacteria can trick each other and garble up each other's languages. We humans are not so dumb, we should be able to do that, too. And so there is this tremendous move in the quorum-sensing field to try to develop a whole new kind of antibiotics based on anti-quorum sensing strategies. And bact...
Like?
Like making insulin and other drugs that we mine from bacteria. Another idea is to try to control commensal bacteria—those 1010bacteria that are in you, and on you, and all over you. They also have quorum sensing. We might be able to make them better at fending off predators or invaders. Maybe we can make pro-biotics that help you not get sick in the first place. There are all these ideas for manipulating quorum sensing that have very practical human consequences. It's an amazing dream.
Do you have a particular dream? What do you want to do in the future?
I want to make an anti-quorum sensing drug. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people. I want the science to be more than "we're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical that impacts people's lives fundamentally. So that's one thing. The other thing is, I just want the fun that I'm having with this group [her lab] to continue, and to keep getting the right people in that group so that the...
http://www.ted.com Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attack...
- 19 min
- 294K
- TED
Bassler and her students helped turn a harmless, bioluminescent bacterium into a star of scientific research—a model organism holding lessons about how all bacteria communicate.
