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Concept
Quorum sensing
Summary
In biology, quorum sensing or quorum signaling (QS) is the ability to detect and respond to cell population density by gene regulation. Quorum sensing is a type of cellular signaling, and more specifically can be considered a type of paracrine signaling. However, it also contains traits of both autocrine signaling: a cell produces both the autoinducer molecule and the receptor for the autoinducer. As one example, QS enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial, especially for phenotypes that would be ineffective at low cell densities and therefore too energetically costly to express. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In a similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. Quorum sensing in pathogenic bacteria activates host immune signaling and prolongs host survival, by limiting the bacterial intake of nutrients, such as tryptophan, which further is converted to serotonin. As such, quorum sensing allows a commensal interaction between host and pathogenic bacteria. Quorum sensing may also be useful for cancer cell communications.
In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. In general, quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system in which the components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected.
Quorum sensing was first reported in 1970, by Kenneth Nealson, Terry Platt, and J. Woodland Hastings, who observed what they described as a conditioning of the medium in which they had grown the bioluminescent marine bacterium Aliivibrio fischeri. These bacteria did not synthesize luciferase—and therefore did not luminesce—in freshly inoculated culture but only after the bacterial population had increased significantly.
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