Meet the 2022 Prize Medal Winner, Prof. Bonnie Bassler
04 April 2022
Each year, the Microbiology Society awards the Prize Medal to an outstanding microbiologist who is a global leader in their field and whose work has had a far-reaching impact beyond the field of microbiology.
Ahead of the Prize Medal Lecture, Brian Leung, a member of our ECM forum, interviewed Prof. Bonnie Bassler to learn more about her career and how it feels to win a Microbiology Society prize.
When did you realise you wanted to pursue science as a career?
In college. I was taking biochemistry and genetics classes with labs. I enjoyed the lab exercises and wondered what it would be like to work in a real research lab. So, I volunteered in one; the professor told me about fascinating unsolved questions, he put me in front of a bench, my lab mentors stuck a pipetman in my hand, and I’ve never looked back!
If you never became a scientist, what would you have done instead?
Been disappointed!
What was your PhD thesis about and how did that lead to your research interest of quorum sensing?
I worked on chemotaxis in marine vibrios as a graduate student. That enabled me to attend a scientific conference on marine microorganisms. There, I heard Mike Silverman present a talk. He is the father of the quorum-sensing field. Mike discovered the first genes and the first mechanism underpinning cell–cell communication and the control of group behaviours in bacteria. That work was in the bioluminescent marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri. I was mesmerised by his seminar and the notion that bacteria could communicate and orchestrate collective behaviour. I had never before heard such a thing even though I had been working on bacterial research projects since I was an undergraduate. I rushed up to the podium after his seminar and begged him to let me be his postdoc. Eventually (!) he relented. I was a postdoc with him for four years and that is where I began the research that I and my team still pursue today.
Was there a specific scientist or piece of research that influenced your research direction?
I was captivated by Mike Silverman’s initial discovery that he described in his seminar. I thought, “Hmmm… bacteria can communicate and coordinate group behaviors? I want to work on that”. I did wonder whether it might be a quirky one-off phenomenon in this one obscure marine bacterium, but then I also thought, it was so amazing, it was worthy of study as there were hopefully more interesting things to learn.
What has been your most significant discovery to date?
Early on, we discovered that bacteria use more than one molecule to communicate, and the molecules encode different pieces of information. Some communication molecules specify “self”, some specify “related family member” some specify “non-self”. Moreover, bacteria can use the information embedded in the chemical blends to learn if they are surrounded mostly by friend or mostly by foe. Bacteria tailor what group tasks they undertake based on whether kin or non-kin (i.e., competitors) are in the neighbourhood.
More recently, we discovered that bacterial communication transcends kingdom boundaries as viruses and higher organisms, including human hosts, participate in these chemical conversations.
What is your lab working on right now?
We are trying to learn how viruses, bacteria and eukaryotes participate in quorum-sensing-mediated communication, how they obtain robust information, and how they act appropriately given complicated and changing sets of organisms, quorum-sensing molecules and conditions.
What is the biggest challenge in the field at the moment?
A big question is to figure out how quorum-sensing works in real world situations with complex and fluctuating conditions and organisms, as opposed to in a well-mixed flask with a single species of bacteria present.
Where do you hope your research will lead to in the next decade?
One hope is that if we can learn enough about how quorum-sensing works in realistic scenarios, we could develop successful pro- and anti-quorum-sensing compounds/strategies that could form the basis of novel applications. Perhaps we could enhance quorum-sensing-mediated communication in beneficial bacteria and disrupt quorum-sensing communication in harmful bacteria. It would be thrilling for medicines or products that benefit humanity to have their origins in what was once a fringe field that was focused on harmless but beautiful bioluminescent bacteria!
How have the challenges in science changed over your career? What advice would you give to an early career scientist?
I think sometimes young scientists might confuse the inherent challenges of scientific research with a sense of not being particularly good at science. We want our research questions to be challenging! We need to learn to enjoy the difficulty of making discoveries. If research questions were easy to answer, others would probably have already answered them, or having the answers would not transform the way we understand the natural world.
I would say don’t give up in the face of research difficulties. Using quorum-sensing as the example, the bacteria had a 4 billion-year head start on us devising and refining their secret languages! We’ve only been trying to sort out these communication systems for 30 years! Of course it is challenging, we have set backs, and we are often mired in lack of understanding, but still, overall, the process is thrilling.
How did COVID-19 affect your research? How did you adapt and keep your research group motivated during those uncertain times?
My gang was heroic! I’m very proud of their tenacity. During the shutdown, we met multiple times each day on Zoom and worked on data, wrote drafts of papers, laid out our next experiments, did journal clubs, practiced seminars and taught each other new techniques. To keep our creative and problem-solving juices flowing, our Zoom sessions started with a poem and riddle of the day. Once back, everyone was totally revved up, got straight to the experiments that we had imagined during the shutdown, and in no time, it was like we had never been gone. Plus, now we all appreciate one another’s company and how exciting and what a privilege it is to be experimentalists even more.
Aside from quorum sensing, if you had unlimited resources, what other research interests would you pursue?
I do have unlimited resources – the creative minds of the lab members! Indeed, our imaginations are our only limitation. I’m happier than I could have ever imagined doing this research because of the team’s fearlessness in this adventure. We do genetics, biochemistry, cell biology, structure, chemistry, physics, engineering, imaging… I am always learning because the research is still expanding into new territory: to mixtures of bacterial species, to viruses, to the human host, and also to 3D biofilm communities, to virulence and to possible medicines… Our current research has almost nothing to do with what I was doing when I started, so, to me, the questions on which we are now focused are new research interests.
You have held many professional positions and received numerous awards and honours. What does this specific prize mean to you?
I was surprised and delighted when I learned I would receive the Medal. It was especially inspiring in the midst of the COVID pandemic to learn that a committee was thinking about my team’s science and how it matters. Also, it is very meaningful to me that this is a microbiology Prize because, at my core, that is who I am! Finally, I’m so proud of my team and their accomplishments. The award is presented to me, but it is genuine validation for the efforts and discoveries of past and present lab members. Beyond my lab, the prize validates the hard work and contributions of all the members of the quorum-sensing field. The prize signifies that what all of us do in the field is important and having an influence.
What will you talk about in your prize lecture?
I will discuss our newest discoveries: how quorum sensing transcends domains from viruses to bacteria to eukaryotes.
Image: Alena Soboleva.
