The Chemical Language of Bacteria

Pictured here is a petri dish swabbed with a culture of bioluminescent marine bacteria. The shapes at the left side of the dish are sketches of the four RNA molecules that control quorum sensing in these talkative bacteria.

What may surprise you is that bacteria communicate using a chemical language, releasing small molecules into the surrounding medium that can be detected through receptors on the surfaces of other bacterial cells. When a critical number of signaling molecules is reached, each individual bacterium knows that enough of its ‘friends’ are now nearby to launch into action. This process is known as quorum sensing.