Learning from Bacterial Chatter - Inside Life Science Series - National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Learning from Bacterial Chatter
By Stephanie Dutchen
Posted January 12, 2011


What do digestion, cholera and tooth plaque have in common? They're all made possible by quorum sensing, a form of bacterial communication. Like a switch flipping from disorganized individualism to unified communal behavior, quorum sensing allows bacteria to accomplish tasks none of them could do alone.


How It Works

Quorum sensing speaks for itself on this lab dish, where more densely packed areas of the marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi glow blue. Credit: Bonnie Bassler.

Bacterial cells make and release chemical signaling molecules into their surroundings. If there are cells of the same kind of bacteria nearby doing the same thing, the molecules accumulate, and the bacteria can count their neighbors by measuring how much of the chemical is around them. When they sense a large enough group, or a quorum, they start acting in synchrony.

Quorum sensing is no simple phenomenon, says Bonnie Bassler, a National Institutes of Health-funded microbial geneticist at Princeton University who has been studying bacterial communication for more than 20 years and who uncovered the molecular signaling process that makes it possible. Employing many molecules and receptors in their chemical conversations, each bacterial species apparently has multiple quorum-sensing systems that involve hundreds of genes.

Bassler discovered that most bacteria appear to be, at a minimum, "bilingual" as well, using one common language to communicate with different bacterial species and other, unique languages to talk to siblings.

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Learning from Bacterial Chatter - Inside Life Science Series - National Institute of General Medical Sciences