Bonnie Bassler Recognized For Work In Quorum Sensing

[JMJones0424]

Bonnie Bassler awarded 2012 L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Award in Life Sciences

 

Bacteria can talk. Yes. Talk. These unicellular, primitive creatures have their own language. They secret chemical words to their environment, where their neighbors can listen, comprehend and react to those messages.

 

This bacterial communication is called quorum sensing (QS).

 

...

 

It turns out that bacteria use QS not only for bioluminescence but also for many other important traits, most important of which, virulence. Actually, in this regard bacteria act very similar to us; if you would want to do something that’s beyond your reach as an individual, you’d talk to some other guys, get the necessary quorum, and then carry it together. Bacteria use exactly the same strategy, or as Bonnie puts it, “they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals”.

Thinking of it, bacteria are microscopic creatures, and probably their only chance to overcome a huge host is by acting together. So they count them self up and only when the right amount of cells is present they launch their virulence attack to take over their host.

 

...

 

So… if we can break the code, eavesdrop the conversation, manipulate the information, we could interfere with bacterial communication to coordinate their attack and thereby prevent disease. A whole new class of bacterial antibiotics. Unlike most common antibiotics, aimed at killing bacteria, a practice which promotes the development of antibiotic resistant strains, this new class of antibiotics would aim to disrupt bacterial communication. Simply preventing bacteria from talking to, or hearing each other and activating their vicious group behaviors.

 

Bassler have already discovered QS antagonist which were shown to disrupt bacterial pathogenesis, preventing it from killing its host, in this case the model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic warm, opening a window to this potentially new antibiotic.

 

Bassler, a pioneer in the field of bacterial communication, a Howard Hughes scholar and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, wants to put things in perspective when she says, that basic science is great, but she would really want to do something practical, “I want to actually, in my life time, help people”, putting the emphasis on generating knowledge for the purpose of solving our problems.

 

Bassler is richly deserving of the 2012 L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Award in Life Sciences “For understanding chemical communication between bacteria and opening new doors for treating infections”. She is still very much engaged in elucidating the secretes of bacterial communication and finding ways to manipulate this knowledge for the benefit of all of us.

 

Written by Ofir Bahar and Pamela Ronald

[belovelife]

sounds like an internet forum

[Michaelangelica]

I wonder about the implications of this for gut bacteria?

We already know that the GIT is next in intelligence after the brain (In fact it is the only system that can countermand brain instructions or operate without it)

There are millions of neurons all bathed in 90% of the body's serotonin (5HTP)

It was hypothesised that if all the bacteria in the gut communicated with all the neurons that were there the GIT would then be afar more intelligent organ than the brain ( or at the very least have a lot more communication happening)

 

When you think about what an amazing chemical factory it is;

picking and choosing what chemicals it wants from food and rearranging others into more or less complex organic chemical molecules,

then shuffling them off to where they need to go, it is a pretty amazing organ/system.

 

Ps a sligly relevant extract from a herb book

Honey

 

Honey has been used for generations toprotect wounds from infection. Recent studies have shown that honey is not onlyantimicrobial it stops bacteria talking/communicating to each other! (“Quorumsensing”)[1].Thus helping reduce bacterial growth.

 

 

 

 

<br clear="all">[1] Truchado P., Lopez-Galvez F., Gil M.I., Tomas-Barberan F.A.,Allende A.,“Quorum sensing inhibitory and antimicrobial activities of honeysand the relationship with individual phenolics.” Food Chemistry. 115 (4) (pp 1337-1344), 2009.

 

 

Edited March 27, 2012 by Michaelangelica

[CraigD]

The idea of quorum sensing becomes even more cool when you consider the similarity between the way bacteria “count their neighbors” before launching a virulent attack, and the way cells in a developing complex organism, including highly structurally organized ones like animals like us differentiate into all of our specialized tissues in precisely the shape dictated by the genes for our gross anatomy – arms, legs, eyes, noses etc. all in the right place not only to be functional, but to look enough like our parents that they can tell their children apart.

 

The late Lynn Margulis, one of my favorite biologists, painted a compelling big-picture view of evolutionary biology where colonies of simple organism such as bacteria eventually become so closely symbiotic that they become the parts of more complicated cells, those cells part of specialized tissues, resulting in us spectacular, histologically and anatomically complicated animals, while retaining many of the abilities of the original individual constituent organism, such as the cilia found in nearly every animal cell being a relic of long-incorporated, once individual spirochete-like organisms.

 

Following this view, the regulating hormone systems that control our bodies development can be considered retained, refined relics of bacterial quorum sensing.

 

We also shouldn’t forget that bacteria have a much “higher bandwidth communication channel” than quorum sensing via messenger chemicals like HSL: they swap genetic material directly via plasmids, a kind of mobile genetic element, which are known collectively by the cool-sounding term mobilome.

 

The biological consensus is that, other than special, limited cases like sexual reproduction and swapping pathogens, we eukaryotes don’t have a trick equivalent to bacterial plasmid transfer, but some good SF (I’m thinking of, and highly recommend, Greg Bear’s 1999 and 2003 Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children) speculated that, maybe, we do.

 

 

We already know that the GIT is next in intelligence after the brain (In fact it is the only system that can countermand brain instructions or operate without it)

There are millions of neurons all bathed in 90% of the body's serotonin (5HTP)

It was hypothesised that if all the bacteria in the gut communicated with all the neurons that were there the GIT would then be afar more intelligent organ than the brain ( or at the very least have a lot more communication happening)

Can you point me to more about this, M :QuestionM As a technologist always on the lookout for something to compute with, I’m fascinated!

 

“Smart” as our gastrointestinal tracts are, I’ve a gut feeling (pun intended) it’s a very non-general intelligence, good mostly for doing what GITs do. While I’d not want to put a sentient nervous system in charge of my digestion (I can barely trust the one I’ve got to avoid making me sick by shoveling all manner of unwise junk down my maw, let alone trust it to digest the stuff properly), I’ll put my money on a brain over a GIT in a test of more conventional intelligence such as, say, a game of Chess. :)