American biologists Jeffrey I. Gordon, Peter Greenberg and Bonnie L. Bassler have been honored this Wednesday with the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research for their contributions on the essential role of microorganism communities in life on the planet and in that of human beings.
Greenberg (New York, 1948), professor of Microbiology at the University of Washington, and Bassler (Chicago, 1962), a researcher at Princeton University, have focused their work on the way in which bacteria communicate with each other (quorum). by emitting chemical signals that modulate their collective behavior.
For his part, Professor Gordon (New Orleans, 1947), a researcher at the Center for Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, has been a pioneer in the discovery and understanding of the human microbiome, the immense quantity and diversity of microorganisms that live in the body, and that they have an essential role in health, including metabolism, immune response and nutrition.
As highlighted by the jury, both discoveries are enabling innovative therapeutic applications and the search for new effective treatments against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Gordon, who has more than 800 publications and 24 patents, has proposed microbiota transplants as an innovative treatment to improve the nutritional status of populations.
The researcher has made progress in the study of the tens of trillions of microorganisms that inhabit the human intestine (several times more than the total number of human cells) and their influence on human health, not only on nutrition, digestion and metabolism -diabetes, obesity, malnutrition- but also in the neurological and immune development of children and young people.
In work using transgenic mice, Gordon was able to demonstrate the importance of nutrient exchange relationships between the microbiota and the host.
Promoter of the Human Microbiome Project, which has made it possible to estimate the species that make up the microbiota at around 10,000 and to sequence the genome of more than a hundred of them to date, Gordon has also focused on the role of the microbiome in the development of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.
This has allowed him to offer a new approach to the treatment of malnutrition in children and its consequences on development, which depends not only on diet but also on the acquisition of a healthy microbiome.
For their part, Bonnie Bassler and Everett Peter Greenberg are pioneers in the study of communication between bacteria through the emission of certain substances, and how the formation of large groups generates a behavior different from that when they are isolated, which is now known as known as “quorum sensing”, a term coined by Greenberg in 1994.
Bassler, who accumulates more than 330 scientific publications, and Greenberg, with at least another 225, separately contributed to understanding and demonstrating this mechanism.
As they have verified through their research, each bacterial species has its own molecule, like a language, which is secreted and recognized only by those of its own species, so that they know when there are others around and tend to form a community (the quorum) that regulates the expression of some genes.
For example, Greenberg discovered in the 1980s that the bioluminescent bacterium Vibrio fischeri only produced light when forming large groups, and that its members coordinated through a chemical signal.
For his part, Bassler studied, from 1990, the phenomenon in the bacterium Vibrio harveyi and unraveled the molecular mechanisms of quorum sensing.
He also discovered that bacteria can emit and receive other substances to communicate between different species and that there is a universal one, “the Esperanto of bacterial languages”, in his own words.
The work of the winners has verified that bacterial communication is important as part of the microbiota of the human organism and for its role in infections, in which there is a stage of low activity until a large group is formed that ends up carrying out an attack massive to the organism.
Based on this phenomenon, antagonist molecules of these substances are being developed to interfere with communication as a possible antimicrobial pathway for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, whose efficacy in mice has already been demonstrated in the laboratory.
