Profile of Bonnie L. Bassler

The Agouron Institute in La Jolla, CA, sits on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. On clear nights, plumes of bioluminescent bacteria, squid, and other organisms drift through the opaque water. “It's like staring at the constellations, only much more intense,” says Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) molecular biologist Bonnie L. Bassler. “The waves glitter. Boat wakes glitter. Your footprints glitter if you walk along the beach.”

Bassler spent 4 years as a postdoctoral fellow at Agouron, which was founded in 1978 by a small grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). She studied the glow-in-the-dark bacteria that cause the oceanic light show. Her work hinged on earlier research demonstrating that these bacteria only gave off light when there were enough of their cohorts around to make it worth the effort. The bacteria kept track of their numbers—quorum sensing—by using chemical signaling molecules called autoinducers.

Over the past two decades, Bassler's research has teased apart how glow-in-the-dark, or bioluminescent, bacteria and other bacterial species communicate with autoinducers. It turns out that bacteria use these chemical messengers in ways reminiscent of the ways humans use language—to organize for a common good, to warn each other about potential dangers, or even to deceive others. Until this research, says Bassler, “there was this general feeling in the scientific community that only higher organisms had intercellular communication.”

The MacArthur Foundation awarded Bassler its prestigious fellowship in 2002, lauding her for her contributions to understanding the bacterial lexicon. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2006.

Her inaugural article in PNAS shows that four small strands of RNA regulate quorum sensing and virulence, the ability of a microorganism to cause disease, in Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that caused cholera epidemics around the world (1). Small RNAs play a significant role …