Office of the
Executive Vice President and Provost

2007-2008 University Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Small Talk: Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria

Bonnie Bassler, Ph.D.
Howard Hughes Medical Investigator
Professor of Molecular Biology
Princeton University

February 12, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

About the Speaker

Dr. Bassler, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She received a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University. After performing postdoctoral work in genetics at the Agouron Institute, she joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. The research in Dr. Bassler's laboratory focuses on the molecular mechanisms that bacteria use for intercellular communication. This process is called quorum sensing. Dr. Bassler is the director of graduate studies in the Molecular Biology Department, and she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. She was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Theobald Smith Society Waksman Award and the American Society for Microbiology’s Eli Lilly Investigator Award for fundamental contributions to microbiological research.Bassler is an editor for Molecular Microbiology and Annual Reviews of Genetics, and she is an associate editor for the Journal of Bacteriology Among other duties, she serves on grant, fellowship, and award review panels for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, American Society for Microbiology, American Academy of Microbiology, Keck Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Society.

Abstract

Bacteria communicate with one another using small chemical molecules that they release into the environment. These molecules travel from cell to cell and the bacteria have receptors on their surfaces that allow them to detect and respond to the buildup of the molecules. This process of cell-to-cell communication in bacteria is called Quorum Sensing and it allows bacteria to synchronize behavior on a population-wide scale. Bacterial behaviors controlled by quorum sensing are usually ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual bacterium acting alone but become effective when undertaken in unison by the group. For example, quorum sensing controls virulence, sporulation, and the exchange of DNA. Thus, quorum sensing is a mechanism that allows bacteria to function as multi-cellular organisms. Cell-to-cell communication in bacteria was likely one of the first steps in the evolution of higher organisms. Current biomedical research is focused on the development of novel anti-bacterial therapies aimed at interfering with quorum sensing. Such therapies could be used to control bacterial pathogenicity.

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