Related papers: Did Maxwell dream of electrical bacteria?
Microbial communities play a significant role in bioremediation,plant growth,human and animal digestion,global elemental cycles including the carbon-cycle,and water treatment.They are also posed to be the engines of renewable energy via…
The exchange of small molecular signals within microbial populations is generally referred to as quorum sensing (QS). QS is ubiquitous in nature and enables microorganisms to respond to fluctuations in living environments by working…
In quorum sensing (QS), bacteria exchange molecular signals to work together. An analytically-tractable model is presented for characterizing QS signal propagation within a population of bacteria and the number of responsive cooperative…
We study the role of Quorum Sensing (QS) in the growth of bacterial colonies and in the bioluminescence produced. These two phenomena are both regulated by QS and the experimental data show a non-trivial correlation between them. It is also…
Bacteria are easily characterizable model organisms with an impressively complicated set of capabilities. Among their capabilities is quorum sensing, a detailed cell-cell signaling system that may have a common origin with eukaryotic…
Bacteria generally live in complicated structures called biofilms, consisting of communicating bacterial colonies and extracellular polymeric substance (EPS). Since biofilms are related to detrimental effects such as infection or antibiotic…
Bacteria communicate using external chemical signals called autoinducers (AI) in a process known as quorum sensing (QS). QS efficiency is reduced by both limitations of AI diffusion and potential interference from neighboring strains. There…
A cooperative drug delivery system is proposed, where quorum sensing (QS), a density-dependent bacterial behavior coordination mechanism, is employed by synthetic bacterium-based nanomachines (B-NMs) for controllable drug delivery. In our…
Within the context of evolution, an altruistic act that benefits the receiving individual at the expense of the acting individual is a puzzling phenomenon. An extreme form of altruism can be found in colicinogenic E. coli. These suicidal…
Quorum sensing (QS) mimickers can be used as an effective tool to disrupt biofilms which consist of communicating bacteria and extracellular polymeric substances. In this paper, a stochastic biofilm disruption model based on the usage of QS…
The design of biological networks using bacteria as the basic elements of the network is initially motivated by a phenomenon called quorum sensing. Through quorum sensing, each bacterium performs sensing the medium and communicating it to…
The social organization of microorganisms has long been a fascinating and challenging subject in both biology and sociology. In these organisms, the role of the individual is far less dominant than that of the community, which functions as…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
We study a generic model for quorum-sensing bacteria in circular confinement. Every bacterium produces signaling molecules, the local concentration of which triggers a response when a certain threshold is reached. If this response lowers…
Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…
The revival mechanism in dormant bacteria is a puzzling and open issue. We propose a model of information diffusion on a regular grid where agents represent bacteria and their mutual interactions implement quorum sensing. Agents may have…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
Bacteria populations rely on mechanisms such as quorum sensing to coordinate complex tasks that cannot be achieved by a single bacterium. Quorum sensing is used to measure the local bacteria population density, and it controls cooperation…
Microorganisms employ sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and environmental sensing, with quorum sensing serving as a fundamental regulatory process. Dysregulation of quorum sensing has been implicated in various…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…