Quorum Sensing

“Quorum sensing” (QS) is what scientists believe infectious microbes do, something they do just before they attack a host and cause disease. They calculate. Scientist believe the bacteria actually plan how virulent they will be on a host before they attack, thus they “strategically” cause disease. Quarum sensing then, is a sort of "bacterial language"--a set of molecular chemical signals between single cells that coordinates group behavior.

Microbiologist Peter Greenberg, at University of Washington, a pioneer in the study of bacterial cell-to-cell signaling, has coined several terms lately relating to the studies of what bacteria do. One is “quorum sensing” and another is “sociomicrobiology,” which he calls the study of microbe social activity. Greenberg says that “bacteria work cooperatively in groups -- communities comparable to ant hills or human cities.” He believes that bacteria will have to be analyzed and eventually combated as groups, not as individual bacteria.

We see some of this effect today as germs unite against us, you have probably heard of how there is an increase of resistance to antibiotic treatments.... This is due to the bacteria doing this "quorum sensing." Sad to say, but this is warfare. The bad bacteria, it seems, are out to get us.

Labrotories have been working hard in research of diseases like pneumonia, malaria, cholera, and meningitis, working to keep bacteria under control and to prevent them from spreading and multiplying. After all, that is why we have vaccines. We have learned many things over the years of research and study, like, how there are good bacteria and bad bacteria, and how host bodies can carry some of these bad bacteria but never have any noticeable symptoms of infection. We have also learned that without enough power these so-called “opportunistic bacteria” are able to grow without doing actual harm, that is until something "changes" and then, when they reach a certain level of concentration in the body, or as Goldberg would say, when it “reaches its quorum, ” well, as some would say, "all hell breaks loose." At this point bacterium somehow sense that they have enough power; they unite and attack, causing the disease.

To Goldberg and other scientists in the field of microbiology, quorum sensing is a very big topic and they are working on ways to break the “coded messages” that the bacteria seem to be sending to one another. The hope is that by breaking these codes, bad bacteria can be kept from reaching their quorums and we can live a happy, disease-free life.

Virulent bacteria live in colonies of self-formed matrixes called biofilms and we do not like it when they cause illness and death. We sometimes find these biofilms on stagnant pools of lakes, ponds and even river water, and we know these kinds of bacteria are potentially hazardous to our health, but we also know that we cannot completely irradiate them, or life as we know it would cease. You see, as gross, stinky and disgusting as these biofilms are, they do serve a greater purpose. It is these very bacterial biofilms, found in soil particles, and in decaying organic matter that help life continue to survive on earth by cycling nutrients around.

While biofilms have these helpful properties, you must remember that they are the very thing your dentist tells you that you have to brush away, and if you don’t they will grow and become what’s called dental plaque, the very bacteria matrix responsible for tooth decay and gum disease.

If this interests you at all, and if you have about 20 minutes, you can watch Bonnie Bassler,professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, give a talk about the secret social lives of bacteria on You tube, here. If you watch, watch all the way to the end and the commercial for "smart grid" too.

Bonnie knows you think of yourself as a human being, but she thinks that you are about 99 percent bacterial. She will educate her audience her about how bacteria behave, how they use chemicals as their words and what they know. She talks about how to fight bacteria... with both "pro-quorum sensing molecules" and "anti- quorum sensing molecules"... which she calls the next generation of antibiotics...something that that will get us around " the big problem of resistance."

Her hope is that what is learned here, will be applied to human behaviors, after all, bacteria are the ones that invented these , like quorum sensing, and you as a human today, are after all descended from the bacteria. You are mostly bacteria anyways, having simply "...evolved a few more bells and whistles..."