What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. This is Kevin. I'm here again with

Nicole Masters, an international agroecologist and a systems thinker, and we are talking today about something very interesting

it's something called quorum signaling and basically it's how to soil microbes and plants

communicate and then how you can actually work to harness

those properties, that signaling.

So, Nicole, I figured you're the expert here,

why don't you drop some knowledge on us

as to what this is in the first

place? So I'm referring to a process called quorum signaling but it started originally

added what they identified as quorum sensing.

So quorum sensing was identified in the 1960s.

They were looking at how is it that squid bioeluminous?

You know, they suddenly flash in color and light and it's actually a

bacteria and what they what they started to research was that the bacteria

would turn on or turn off in response to signaling with chemicals,

how many other organisms are, individuals are in my environment.

Are there others like me and when they reached a peak point they could actually send these signals to turn on and off.

So the medical people have been looking at this in terms of how does this apply to human

health?

Could we figure out instead of putting antibiotics which just

kill everything, could we figure out the signal to turn on and off virulence? So for instance,

at any one time you could have strep organisms in and on you but you don't have a strep throat then suddenly you've got a sore throat.

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