The social life of bacteria: collapse of a culture

Dr. Greenberg studies bacterial communication and cooperation. His work focuses on quorum sensing in the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. He has elucidated the quorum sensing signals, determines how the signals are synthesized, how the signal receptors function to activate a constellation of about 300 genes in P. aeruginosa, and he has developed quorum sensing antagonists. His talk will stress his recent “social engineering” work aimed at understanding the evolutionary pressures that either stabilize quorum sensing and cooperation or that can lead to infiltration of quorum sensing mutants and ultimately a tragedy of the commons in the bacterial world.