BBC Future
TED Quotes | 14 June 2012

How bacteria 'talk' to each other

I know you think of yourselves as human beings but I think of you as 99% bacterial. — Bonnie Bassler

Synopsis

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 implications for medicine, industry - and our understanding of ourselves. Talk recorded 6 February 2009.

About the Speaker

Bonnie Bassler studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for new, more potent medicine. In 2002, bearing her microscope on a microbe that lives in the gut of fish, Bonnie Bassler isolated an elusive molecule called AI-2, and uncovered the mechanism behind mysterious behavior called quorum sensing -- or bacterial communication. She showed that bacterial chatter is hardly exceptional or anomolous behavior, as was once thought -- and in fact, most bacteria do it, and most do it all the time. (She calls the signaling molecules "bacterial Esperanto.")

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