Combinatorial quorum sensing allows bacteria to resolve their social and physical environment

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1319175111
• Publication Date: 2014-03-05T01:22:49Z
• Authors: Daniel M. Cornforth; Roman Popat; Luke McNally; James Gurney; Thomas C. Scott-P...; Alasdair Ivens; Stephen P. Diggle; Sam P. Brown
• Keywords: Population Density; 0301 basic medicine; Diffusion Sensing, Bacterial Signaling, Efficiency Sensing, Collective Behavior, Bacterial Cooperation; Computational Biology; Quorum Sensing; Gene Expression Regulation, Bacterial; Environment; Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; Microarray Analysis; Models, Biological; 03 medical and health sciences; Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Computer Simulation

Significance Many bacterial species engage in a form of cell–cell communication known as quorum sensing (QS). Despite great progress in unravelling the molecular mechanisms of QS, controversy remains over its functional role. There is disagreement over whether QS surveys bacterial cell density or rather environmental properties like diffusion or flow, and moreover there is no consensus on why many bacteria use multiple signal molecules. We develop and test a new conceptual framework for bacterial cell–cell communication, demonstrating that bacteria can simultaneously infer both their social (density) and physical (mass-transfer) environment, given combinatorial (nonadditive) responses to multiple signals with distinct half-lives. Our results also show that combinatorial communication is not restricted solely to primates and is computationally achievable in single-celled organisms.