Sense and sensibility in bacteria. VIIIth International Conference on Bacterial Locomotion and Sensory Transduction.

Introduction Two hundred bacterial researchers gathered in an unseasonably cold Boca Raton for the VIIIth Bacterial Locomotion and Sensory Transduction (BLAST) meeting. They quickly warmed to a programme that revealed several key themes. Bacterial flagellar motility and chemotaxis are relatively well understood, with studies increasingly moving to the structural level with contributions from crystallography and electron microscopy. At the same time, genomic data and new experimental models have allowed significant advances in understanding several types of non-flagellar gliding motility. The traditional two-component chemotactic systems are also being studied on a structural level, to determine how phosphosignalling from tactic receptor teams is achieved. Finally, recent work on alternative regulatory systems shows interactions between motility, synthetic, sensory and pathogenicity genes and confirms that bacterial regulatory pathways comprise a true network with many dynamic interactions between the components. These advances highlight the need for further in-depth understanding of the principles of bacterial cellular architecture and the determinants of cell polarity. Bacteria are spatially and sensorially highly organized, and this organization is very dynamic: they are so much more than just simple bags of enzymes.