2011 Volume 25 Issue 4 Pages 221-234
Recent progress in microbiology has shed light on the importance of cell-to-cell communication in bacteria, which organizes and reinforces bacterial communities consisting of single-celled organisms. Bacteria often use chemical compound as a communication signal. Quorum sensing is the best-studied phenomenon for cell-to-cell communication in bacteria, in which a cell senses the outside concentration of autoinducer to recognize the cell density of the same species/strain and consequently turns on or off the expression of certain genes. In this review, cell-to-cell chemical communications in Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and their signal transduction mechanisms are overviewed.
