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.'"
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.
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.
The base layer you're referring to is usually termed a "biofilm", and they are complex, three-dimensional, organized structures of living (and some "hibernating") organisms.
I think the best large-scale analogy to a biofilm would be a rainforest, where there are many levels of depth with complexity that varies depending on where you're looking.
Chemical penetration through that multi-layered structure is extremely complex, and usually substantially slowed. In many cases even potent chemicals such as bleach won't reach the base layers, despite multiple washings with long incubations.
It's not really a problem of being restricted only to "nice" chemicals: we haven't found -any- chemicals that act as a magic bullet. Back when I started research in the field it was thought that quorum sensing might be the cure we were looking for, but it turned out to be much less useful than hoped.
As for the previous comments on Dr. Bassler and her "discoveries", I think people react negatively to exaggerated claims of novelty. If the fault for that those exaggerations lay with TED, then they are being a bit sloppy, but if Bassler herself suggests that she is intellectually dishonest. Her work ~1994 seems to be very highly regarded in establishing the study of quorum sensing, but there are several papers from the years just previous to that which actually discovered it.
"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.
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.