Molecular biology professor Bonnie Bassler kicked off the 2005-06 President's Lecture Series with a lecture yesterday on her groundbreaking research about the ways bacterial cells communicate with each other.
Introduced by President Tilghman as the "quintessential scientist-educator," Bassler won the prestigious MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 2002, and was named a Howard Hughes Investigator this year.
The purpose of her lecture, Bassler said, was to convince the audience that "[b]acteria can talk to each other, that language is chemical and that they are multilingual."
Speaking to a full audience in the Friend Center, Bassler explained how cells use molecules, called autoinducers, to communicate and participate in "collective gene regulation." Bassler discovered a chemical process, known as quorum sensing, which was the first indication that bacteria could act like a multicellular organism. Previously, scientists believed that different bacterial cells could not communicate with each other.
Bacteria use multiple types of autoinducers, each with a distinct purpose. Bassler's experiments showed that the chemicals some kinds of bacteria use to communicate with members of their own species differ from those used for interspecies communication.
The work may have clinical implications. Virulent bacteria like salmonella and E. coli use quorum sensing to determine when they should replicate, Bassler said. If their quorum-sensing mechanisms could be disabled, the bacteria strains could theoretically be rendered harmless.
Before this happens, however, Bassler said more research needs to be done. Comparatively few autoinducer molecules have been identified, so it is possible that many more organisms have quorum sensing processes that have not yet been detected. Also, the mechanism by which different species of bacteria identify each other has not been discovered.
Pulitzer Prizewinning humanities professor Paul Muldoon is scheduled to deliver the next President's Lecture in December.
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