Slashdot Mirror
Cracking the Code of Bacterial Communication
TEDChris writes "Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler explains her discovery of 'quorum sensing' — the amazing ability of bacteria to communicate with each other and coordinate attack strategies (video). By cracking the communication code, she has opened up potential for a new class of drugs tackling microbial diseases. The talk got a massive standing ovation at this year's TED and has just been posted. To quote one commenter: 'This is by far the most inspiring, amazing, and far-reaching talk I've seen in a very long time.'"
One of the leading health concerns is household mold and staph. The inhalation of these over years of exposure leaves the body weakened and infected. In very bad cases it can lead to pneumonia and in the worst case staph infections which lead to amputation.
If they can find a way to reduce or eliminate bacteria growth in the home, they are halfway to eliminating disease in Western nations.
Bacteria are the oldest organisms on the planet", Oh Really? I guess "Archaea" are just called that for fun.
I'm certain she knows all the stuff you just mentioned, maybe she even teaches a "microbiology 101" and covers that.
Sounds like she was talking to a crowd that wouldn't know eubacteria from archaea. Kind of like if an entomologist uses "bugs" to refer to insects and arachnids. She was obviously "dumbing it down" for a specific crowd. So she's not being 100% accurate in the details that the audience won't remember, big deal. Maybe she went too far, it's debatable, but her talk sounds like it went over well with the audience and was a success. I say good job, focusing too much on trivial details is a good way to ensure ineffective communication.
Why are you so quick to criticize? Ever researcher wants more money, otherwise they can't continue doing research. duh.
"Bacteria are the oldest organisms on the planet", Oh Really? I guess "Archaea" are just called that for fun.
Classification changes though, when I took biology we didn't have a 3 domain system, and Archaea were considered a sub section of Bacteria. I know this is based on newer theories of their evolutionary history, but really, this history had nothing to her research.
Forget about Antibiotics. As she said, your body needs bacteria to live, so better understanding how to control and perhaps even help bacteria do their job inside you is important.
Wouldn't it be nice to reduce malnourishment problems if you could give impoverished people really efficient bacteria?
Wouldn't it be easier than a tummy tuck if you just gave someone lazy bacteria ?
I think it is interesting, but it is a free country and you are welcome to spit on what she cares about.
The method of anti-bacterial action you say she presents is precisely how bacteriostatic antibiotics work, by inhibiting growth of bacterial populations; the point is to give your immune system a chance to catch up with the bugs, making them more manageable. In that sense, it's not a stretch that drugs that imitate quorum sensing signals could replace antibiotics. At the very least, more drug options would be provided. This would be important when the bugs become resistant to our existing drugs.
I doubt he invented the concept. In the afterward sections of his books, he often talks about how he draws from other sources. I'm pretty sure in one of his books he mentions how he consulted medical workers on plausible scenarios; Card could've simply picked up the idea of communicating via chemicals through such an experience. While the earliest scientific article I can find on quorum sensing, through PubMed and Web of Science, is from 1995, I'm sure the idea of microorganisms communicating through such a mechanism is much older and probably predates Xenocide.
I read this about bacteria communication as reported in Science News in January:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39602/title/Team_spirit
Different researchers are interviewed, though.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Quorum Sensing"... I remember that phrase. It sounds strangely like something we considered putting into our signal transduction paper back in 2004 (published 2006). It was Lisa, not I, who did the reading on quorum sensing, so I can't claim to be well-read in the subject.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=search&term=cashin+goldsack+hall
Ask me about repetitive DNA
just keep taking the drug, forever, and you'll never get the symptoms that your immune system needs to tell it to fight off the infection
You do have a good point... delaying virulence while the bacterium continues reproducing is probably bad because if you ever stop the drugs, you get a much worse infection. But I would bet your body will still know the bacteria are there, before they reach critical mass. It would still detect the proteins of the bacterium cell walls.
You could go the other direction: on exposure to something, you could get a shot of the receptor that caused virulence. The bacterium would, possibly, burn itself out before reaching critical mass or release useless pathogens before it was bound to a host's cell (e.g.).
This type of treatment might be able to slow down infection, giving your system time to fight it off. It might be useful for, say, battlefield injuries to slow the nasty infection while they drag your limp body to a medic, despite the fact you'll have to fight off more of the pathogen.
It would also be really useful as an on-off switch for a living glow-stick :-)
based on your comments, you must be taking microbiology 101 right now. you are clearly neither an actual microbiologist nor an immunologist, and it would be best if you don't try to critique things about which you have no clue.
bonnie bassler was one of the discoverers and is a lead researcher of quorum sensing. try a google scholar search for "bassler quorum sensing."
"the whole mechanism of our immune system is based on detecting the harm that pathogens cause". what are you talking about? do you know anything about T cells, B cells, or toll-like receptors? I didn't think so.
given how the immune system actually works, blocking virulence is a legitimate strategy for antibiotics, not least because it could exert less selective pressure on the microbes. while virulence was blocked, your immune system would be able to recognize and eliminate the bacteria.
bonnie bassler doesn't need grant money. she's hhmi (http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/bassler_bio.html) and has a macarthur "genius" fellowship, both of which are essentially blank checks for top-flight researchers. I'm sure you already knew that though.
Or, in a nutshell:
There is money in curing a disease.
But there is more money in treating it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Heh, TED is a conference for rich people and washed out movie stars who wanna smooze with scientists. The price of admission is this kind of pandering.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Stopping them from making the biofilm or communicating IS as good as killing them, because it leaves them vulnerable to the body's defenses that they would be invulnerable to. It's a form of bacteriostatic drug like the ones given for anthrax, rickettsia (Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever), bubonic plague, etc. Those are bacteria you don't want to kill quickly.
I found it interesting that she didn't expand on what the actual effects of the quorum drugs were. She just said that we have these quorum suppressors and quorum enhancers and we're going to use them to fix our problems. Why? Why would an enhancer be useful and a suppressor be useful? when? Felt more like "we found a way to meddle with the system and are going to flail our hands wildly and hope something good happens!"
The mouse example was a good illustration of this. After all the setup describing what they did, the conclusion: "the mouse lived" or "the mouse died". Well, THAT demonstrates a good understanding and thorough conclusion now doesn't it? I'd feel a lot better if they acted like they had any idea WHY the mouse lived or died, other than based on what drugs they treated it with. Why did the drugs help? What specific bacterial behaviors were altered?
My wild speculation here is that if you pump a bunch of those quorum signals into a body, you fool the bacteria into believing they are a lot more numerous, and trigger their pathogenic (dangerous/attack) behavior (and thus an accelerated immune system response) before there's enough bacteria present to overcome the immune system. Instead, the immune system has the time to get ramped up and move to action while there's still a low bacterial count, and the bacteria are wiped out. THAT'S the kind of conclusion I was expecting from this presentation. But instead I was sadly disappointed by the almost complete lack of followthrough at the end of what started as a very interesting presentation.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Uh, I'm checking notes from my Bacterial Pathogenesis lectures, and they say that YOU'RE wrong. The University of Southern Carolina med school site also has a page of notes on this matter that agrees with what I've learned; this isn't based soley on the TED talk, this is based on what I've learned from prior experience in bacterial pathology.
http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/mayer/antibiot.htm
"Antibiotics are categorized as bactericidal if they kill the susceptible bacteria or bacteriostatic if they reversibly inhibit the growth of bacteria. In general the use of bactericidal antibiotics is preferred but many factors may dictate the use of a bacteriostatic antibiotic. When a bacteriostatic antibiotic is used the duration of therapy must be sufficient to allow cellular and humoral defense mechanisms to eradicate the bacteria."
Or am I misunderstanding something? Are you a biologist of some sort with experience in the field?