Finding the constant in bacterial com...( DURHAM N.C. The Rosetta Stone of ba...)

DURHAM, N.C. The Rosetta Stone of bacterial communication may have been found.

Although they have no sensory organs, bacteria can get a good idea about what's going on in their neighborhood and communicate with each other, mainly by secreting and taking in chemicals from their surrounding environment. Even though there are millions of different kinds of bacteria with their own ways of sensing the world around them, Duke University bioengineers believe they have found a principle common to all of them.

The researchers said that a more complete understanding of communication between cells and bacteria is essential to the advancement of the new field of synthetic biology, where populations of genetically altered bacteria are "programmed" to do certain things. Such re-programmed bacterial gene circuits could see a wide variety of applications in medicine, environmental cleanup and biocomputing.

It is already known that a process known as "quorum sensing" underlies communication between bacteria. However, each type of bacteria seems to have its own quorum-sensing abilities, with tremendous variations, the researchers said.

"Quorum sensing is a cell-to-cell communication mechanism that enables bacteria to sense and respond to changes in the density of the bacteria in a given environment," said Anand Pai, graduate student in bioengineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. "It regulates a wide variety of biological functions such as bioluminescence, virulence, nutrient foraging and cellular suicide."

The researchers found that the total volume of bacteria in relation to the volume of their environment is a key to quorum sensing, no matter what kind of microbe is involved.

"If there are only a few cells in an area, nothing will happen," Pai said. "If there are a lot of cells, the secreted chemicals are high in concentration, causing the cells to perform a specific action. We wanted to find out how these cel
'/>"/>