Decoding microbial chatter: cell-cell communication in bacteria.

Intelligence operations worldwide monitor individuals directly or indirectly linked to terrorist networks for their communication activities, collectively described as “chatter.” Considerable effort and resources are devoted to assessing intelligence chatter. A major challenge is to distinguish innocuous, everyday discourse from those missives that act to coordinate more nefarious activities. Microorganisms also chatter, and our ability to understand the routes, mechanisms, and purposes of these communications may have profound effects on human health, industry, agriculture, and the environment. Bacteria communicate and coordinate their activities through chemical signals that either diffuse through the extracellular environment or remain cell associated. As with the global surveillance of human chatter, research activity focused on microbial communication mechanisms has intensified over recent years. The study of bacterial communication systems is an extremely active area of microbiology and has generated a significant paradigm shift in the way we perceive and examine microbial populations. Given the intense interest in microbial signaling systems, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) sponsored its second conference on Cell-Cell Communication in Bacteria from 23 to 27 July 2004 (CCCB-04) in Banff, Canada. The Banff conference continued the trend initiated at the 2001 conference (in Snowbird, Utah) of outstanding presentations on bacterial signaling but also considerably expanded the scope of signaling systems covered, with 230 scientists in attendance delivering 48 oral presentations and 137 posters. Over the 3 1/2-day conference, oral presentations were given in seven thematically organized sessions in the mornings and evenings, and posters were viewed on each afternoon. The scientific discourse at this conference was highly stimulating, with work ranging from structure-function analysis of signaling mechanisms to the ecology of signaling in natural environments. We attempted in this review to select specific findings that embody recent experimental and conceptual advances in the area of microbial signaling.