Summary of Article
Bonnie Bassler and her lad work on quorum-sensing at Princeton. They main focus is to figure out how bacterium communicate with one another. There are many types of bacteria, both good and bad, that are all over the place. So what does Bassler do? She works with her students to figure out how these good and bad bacteria communicate to fight against each other. Instead of using words, she believes that they sense things and react with one another.
What is Quorum-Sensing?
Quorum-sensing is just another way of saying bacteria work together, communicate, and function well in groups. Bassler works with these bacteria, which are single-celled organisms that have no nucleus and only one piece of DNA. These bacteria cells do reproduce, but not as we do. They reproduce asexually, meaning that they just get larger and make an exact replica of themselves and just simply divide in half. After they reproduce they release a chemicals that we call auto-inducers, but is more commonly known as hormones. It starts out with a little bit of this molecule but when you get more bacteria to reproduce, you get more auto-inducers. One way to demonstrate how they communicate is when there is a lot of bacteria and auto-inducers, some of the bacteria start clinging onto the molecule because there are a lot of other bacterium around and they think they need to change their behaviors. This all got started because of a glowing substance known as Vibrio harveyi. They had put some bacteria in with this but it didn't glow as much, but when they added more of this bacteria, the glow started to get brighter. This is showing how Quorum-sensing really works because the glow is being controlled by quorum-sensing.
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