NOVA Bacteria Talk

This article is all about the communciation between different kinds of bacteria and how they react with eachother. It explains how you can find bacteria anywhere and everywhere, but not all of them are bad. Bonnie Bassler did a lab with her students about how bacteria cells can communicate with eachother and organize themselves into groups and function with eachother. This process of how they communicate and function is called quorum sensing. The article explains how bacteria are all just one cell and have one piece of DNA inside of them, and they reproduce by pinching themselves in half and making an exact replica of themselves.

When bacteria grows, they release a small amount of chemicals. With more cells growing, there is more of this molecule. When the auto-inducer molecule is at significant concentration, they start grabbing on to this molecule. These molecules have receptors that allow other molecules to know that there are a lot of other cells in that same area. This allows all the cells to change their behavior and act the same. In their lab, they worked with a marine bacterium named Vibrio harveyi, after E. Newton Harvey. It is a bacterium from the ocean, and it makes bioluminescence. Bacteria is able to grow because they make enzymes that produce photons of beautiful blue light. You don't have to go very far down into the ocean before it turns pitch black, so it is very important for these bacteria to either make their own light or use someone elses'. Bonnie Bassler and this lab has allowed the world to see bacteria in a different way and realize that it communicates and functions in a certain way. Bassler explains that bacteria is now known to be multilingual and different species of bacteria have a different language to communicate with. She states that one species still can't understand the private languages of other species. But they can all understand the trade language. We now know that there is this tremendous move in the quorum-sensing field trying to develop a whole new kind of antibiotics which is based on anti-quorum sensing strategies. Bonnie says that her dream is to create an anti-quorum sensing drug in order to help people.

So what exactly is quorum sensing?

Quorum sensing is a brand new branch of microbiology that was discovered by Bonnie Bassler. It is just a fancy way of saying how bacteria communicates with eachother. They produce and release chemical signals that are called autoinducers. The job of these autoinducers is to find other bacteria in the same area from the same species. This process is called cell-to-cell communication, and this allows cells to work and function together. This discovery is incredibly important, because scientists will now be able to study it in detail and  work on new drugs that can fight away bacterial diseases.