It's Friday, December 14th, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date from Inquiring Minds.

I'm And I'm Kishore Hari. I have a weird story to share with you this week.

Oh, I like weird.

Yeah. So back, you know, for about the last 20, maybe even 30 years, there's been this small area of research in biology about a phenomenon

called quorum sensing, which is this idea that bacteria, particularly bacteria that are

trying to invade another host, actually can communicate with each other. But the way they

communicate is kind of strange.

When a bacteria gets into an area, they release these sort of molecules, these small

molecules that bind receptors on another bacteria in the area.

And by releasing this molecules and kind of getting a sense for, you know, the concentration

and all of that stuff, they can get a sense of

how many other bacteria are in the area. And they use this kind of intelligent information to

essentially make decisions about whether they should be replicating in this host or try to spread out

to the other hope, to a new host altogether.

And one of the bacteria that does this is called vibrio cholerae, which is the bacteria that causes cholera.

And this kind of intelligence and something that we associate as being, you know, a relatively simple organism in a bacteria

is pretty remarkable.

Yeah, I mean, does it, does this basically work through changing gene expression?

I mean, I'm trying to think about what, what is the mechanism behind a bacterium's ability to change

its behavior?

Yeah, so it secretes a signaling molecule called DPO,

and then it gets detected by a protein.

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