Bacterial communication systems: An eventual drug target?
Bonnie Bassler from Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology spoke at a recent TED conference on mechanisms of bacterial communication. She explained her group’s discovery that bacteria commnuicate with one another using special “quorum-sensing” molecules which allow them to act in unison, much as the cells in a multicellular organism do. Their discoveries allow for some interesting speculation about the origins of multicellular life (and, I think, of cooperative behaviors in general). This video is aimed at a lay audience, but is very well done.
Perhaps more relevant to pathology is that her group showed that the virulence of some bacterial species is at least partially controlled by this quorum-sensing system, and that drugs that block the mechanism may be potentially valuable as antibiotics. A early review of their work was published in PNAS in 2003 (free full text), and is interesting reading.
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