Microbes communicate with each other. Although we humans cannot hear this language, we can experience some of the effects of this communication: for example, some bacteria grow by "agreement" in protected cell clusters, biofilms, which we recognise as slimy coatings (on seals or in washing machine rinse chambers). Bacteria use small chemical molecules to communicate. This is how they detect how many and which neighbours are in their environment. If a certain threshold value of chemical molecules - a quorum - is reached, they activate a certain behaviour, for example the ability to glow (bioluminescence) or the formation of biofilms. This is why the language of bacteria is also known as quorum sensing ("measuring a number"). The language of microbes is as diverse as that of humans. There are different languages - i.e. chemical molecules - comparable to the different national languages. Within a national language there are also various dialects, i.e. different structural variants of a signalling molecule. In a microbial community, there are bacteria that can both speak and listen and those that only listen but do not speak themselves and therefore hide within the community. Each bacterial species speaks a different number of languages. Microbes communicate with each other in a similar way to humans and thus share their intentions.

© Text and figure Nancy Weiland-Bräuer / VAAM, nweiland[at]ifam.uni-kiel.de, Use according to CC 4.0

Read more:

Small Talk - Die stille Kommunikation der Bakterien I Narrareno Dominelli, Ralf Heermann I Biologie in unserer Zeit, Dez. 2020