September 23, 2021, via Zoom Presented in association with the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Kansas City, the Princeton Alumni Association of Greater Kansas City, and the Yale Club of Kansas City. The program: Bacteria are tiny ancient organisms. Harmful bacteria have the capacity to kill humans, animals, and plants. How do bacteria do it? The answer is that bacteria work in groups: They communicate, count their numbers, and act as collectives to carry out processes that would be unproductive if undertaken by an individual bacterium acting alone. Current biomedical research seeks to interfere with bacterial communication as a strategy to combat globally-important bacterial pathogens. The speaker: Dr. Bonnie Bassler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, wants to understand how bacteria communicate and orchestrate group behaviors. This process, known as quorum sensing, relies on chemical “words” and enables populations of bacteria to regulate gene expression, and therefore behavior, on a community-wide scale. Through a range of approaches, Bassler and her team are providing insight into: intra-species, inter-species, and inter-domain communication; population-level cooperation; and the principles underlying signal transduction and information processing at the population and individual cell levels. One objective of Bassler’s team is to develop quorum-sensing interference strategies to combat pathogenic bacteria that use this process to regulate virulence. Dr. Bassler received a BS in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, and a PhD in biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University.

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