annual conference 2022: prize medal winner q&a

professor bonnie bassler, winner of the 2022 prize medal, will be delivering her lecture 'quorum sensing across domains: from viruses to bacteria to eukaryotes' virtually on monday 4 april during the annual conference 2022.  

after the lecture, bonnie will be taking part in a live q&a chaired by nominator and co-chair of the impact and influence committee, dr chloe james.  

during the q&a delegates will have the opportunity to hear pre-submitted questions from the 2022世界杯对阵分析 about bonnie’s research, career journey, thoughts on current affairs influencing the scientific community and more.  

to submit your questions, please complete this form by no later than midnight gmt on 20 march 2022. 

 

prize medal lecture 2022: quorum sensing across domains: from viruses to bacteria to eukaryotes

bonnie bassler (princeton university, usa)

bacteria communicate with one another via the production and detection of secreted signal molecules called autoinducers. this cell-to-cell communication process, called “quorum sensing”, allows bacteria to synchronize behaviour on a population-wide scale. we showed that behaviours controlled by quorum sensing are ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual bacterium acting alone but become effective when undertaken in unison by the group. for example, quorum sensing controls virulence factor production and biofilm formation. we found that eukaryotes that harbour quorum-sensing bacteria participate in these chemical conversations by providing the substrates bacteria need to make autoinducers. finally, we found that quorum-sensing autoinducer information can be hijacked by viruses that infect and kill bacteria. thus, interactions across the eukaryotic, bacterial, and viral domains all rely on quorum sensing. presumably, each entity in these combined beneficial and parasitic partnerships is garnering the information encoded in quorum-sensing autoinducers to optimize its survival and reproduction. using what we have learned, we have built quorum-sensing disruption strategies for development into new anti-microbials. we have also engineered viruses to respond to user-defined inputs, rather than the bacterial autoinducers, to make phage therapies that kill particular bacterial pathogens on demand.