{"id":131,"date":"2013-02-14T14:17:03","date_gmt":"2013-02-14T14:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bioengineer.org\/bonnie-bassler-how-bacteria-talk\/"},"modified":"2013-08-30T18:53:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-30T18:53:47","slug":"bonnie-bassler-how-bacteria-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bioengineer.org\/bonnie-bassler-how-bacteria-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Bonnie Bassler: How bacteria "talk""},"content":{"rendered":"
In 2002, bearing her microscope on a microbe that lives in the gut of fish, Bonnie Bassler isolated an elusive molecule called AI-2, and uncovered the mechanism behind mysterious behavior called quorum sensing — or bacterial communication. She showed that bacterial chatter is hardly exceptional or anomolous behavior, as was once thought — and in fact, most bacteria do it, and most do it all the time. (She calls the signaling molecules “bacterial Esperanto.”)<\/p>\n
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