Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen which is responsible for a wide range of infections. Production of virulence factors and biofilm formation by P. aeruginosa are partly regulated by cell-to-cell communication quorum-sensing systems. Identification of quorum-quenching reagents which block the quorum-sensing process can facilitate development of novel treatment strategies for P....

Quorum sensing is a communication system by which bacteria use signal molecules to induce physiological response. In natural marine environments, quorum suspected occur in regions with high cell densities. Free-living bacteria, however, are largely believed exist at concentrations too low make of density-dependent quorum-sensing system. Due so-called ‘free-living’ inhabiting gels composed exopo...

Among failure-prone and dynamic distributed systems there is a significant class of systems that strive for high availability and can function with inconsistent data. Examples include flight reservation systems which allow overbooking or emergency ambulance systems which return informative responses to time-critical queries. Data replication is a well-known technique for tolerating failures and...

Legume-nodulating bacteria (rhizobia) usually produce N-acyl homoserine lactones, which regulate the induction of gene expression in a quorum-sensing (or population-density)-dependent manner. There is significant diversity in the types of quorum-sensing regulatory systems that are present in different rhizobia and no two independent isolates worked on in detail have the same complement of quoru...

Bacteria communicate with each other by the use of signaling molecules, a process called 'quorum sensing'. One group of quorum sensing molecules includes the oligopeptides, which are mainly produced by Gram-positive bacteria. Recently, these quorum sensing peptides were found to biologically influence mammalian cells, promoting i.a. metastasis of cancer cells. Moreover, it was found that bacter...

Quorum responses provide a means for group-living animals to integrate and filter disparate social information to produce accurate and coherent group decisions. A quorum response may be defined as a steep increase in the probability of group members performing a given behaviour once a threshold minimum number of their group mates already performing that behaviour is exceeded. In a previous stud...

In Gram-negative bacteria, quorum sensing is mediated by N-acylhomoserine lactones (AHL) to regulate different biological functions, including production of virulence factors. Quorum quenching refers to the interruption of quorum sensing, and the most attractive way is to degrade the AHL molecules. With the aim of isolating soil bacteria capable of blocking quorum sensing by inactivating AHL, a...

Quorum sensing was once considered a way in which a species was able to sense its cell density and regulate gene expression accordingly. However, it is now becoming apparent that multiple microbes can sense particular quorum-sensing molecules, enabling them to sense and respond to other microbes in their neighbourhood. Such interactions are significant within the context of polymicrobial diseas...

Bacteria use a process of chemical communication called quorum sensing to assess their population density and to change their behavior in response to fluctuations in the cell number and species composition of the community. In this work, we identified the quorum-sensing-regulated proteome in the model organism Vibrio harveyi by bio-orthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT). BONCAT en...

Quorum-sensing networks enable bacteria to sense and respond to chemical signals produced by neighboring bacteria. They are widespread: over 100 morphologically and genetically distinct species of eubacteria are known to use quorum sensing to control gene expression. This diversity suggests the potential to use natural protein variants to engineer parallel, input-specific, cell-cell communicati...