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Bacteria Talk To Each Other On Bassler Video

Bacteria talk with each other using a chemical 'language'. Using quorum sensing, they can even coordinate their defenses and mount attacks.

This amazing talk by researcher Bonnie Bassler, who teaches molecular biology at Princeton, goes through some of the discoveries made by her lab group. It's about eighteen minutes long, but it's a fabulous presentation.


(Bonnie Bassler on bacterial communication and quorum sensing video)

Just one of the many topics covered is the subject of intra-species communication by bacteria. It turns out that all bacterial "languages" all share the same root "words".


(Intraspecies Communication)

Regular technovelgy readers already know about some of these developments; I wrote about Bassler's work on quorum sensing four years ago. Five years ago, I even compared the universal language of bacteria to Esperanto, just like Dr. Bassler did in this 2009 video.

As you learned in this video, you're only about 10% human; let your bacterial majority feast upon these links:

I almost forgot to mention my own introduction to the idea that bacteria might 'talk' to each other and even communicate with the host - namely, the intelligent cells from the marvelous 1984 novel Blood Music, by Greg Bear. This video comes from the TED conference - see Bonnie Bassler: Discovering bacteria's amazing communication system.

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