Bacteria Culture

Quorum sensing is the unbelievable process in which bacteria, who have no nervous system whatsoever, are able to communicate with each other. Bacteria are single celled organism, but don’t be fooled, they are as diverse, some would say more diverse, than all of the eukaryotes combined, (plants, animals, etc). For hundreds of years scientists thought that bacteria acted as individuals, separately from each other. In fact this is not the case at all, almost everything bacteria do is based on all the other bacteria around them. They are able to do this by releasing a certain chemical into the surrounding environment. Normally these chemicals would be dispersed into the environment and forgotten, but if there are a lot, I mean A LOT, of bacteria in the surrounding environment all these chemicals start to build up. When the amount of the chemical in the environment reaches a certain concentration proportional to the number of bacteria, the bacteria react to this and, all at once, carry out a certain task.

For example a bacterium might want to invade all the cells in your lungs in order to reproduce more efficiently and kill you, but it knows for a fact that it can’t do this on its own. This is because your immune system would be able to stop it before it even had a chance to munch on your delicious endosomes, or whatever it wants to invade and destroy. So instead of going on a suicide mission the bacterium decides to lay back, and stay cool for a little while, build up it’s numbers first. Eventually the bacterium will reproduce until maybe one day, if everything goes as planned, it reaches a population that would be impossible for your immune system to contain. Then, out of nowhere, they attack and kill you. If the bacterium had acted on its own your body would have killed it and then memorized what it looked like, so that if it ever came back it could be dealt with more efficiently. But now, because it was smart and waited for some back up, it can effectively invade your body with the help of its large family.

Obviously bacteria don’t only use quorum sensing for killing humans, they use it for hundreds, if not thousands of things. Each different kind of bacteria is like its own culture, with its own chemicals and proportions used for quorum sensing. Every single bacterium knows when it’s supposed to act and doesn’t question it. They have no leaders; they act as one, a single cohesive group.

Quorum sensing is great for us humans too. A massive amount of our body weight is bacteria, friendly organisms, and if we didn’t have them we wouldn’t be able to carry out some of our most basic processes. Not only that, but, anyone that has studied history knows that by understanding another nation’s culture one can more easily manipulate and eventually destroy that culture/nation. We can do the same thing to pathogenic bacteria, now that we know their secrets. We can create inhibitors (chemicals that look like the ones the bacteria use for quorum sensing), which prevent a bacterium from knowing how many other bacteria there are around them. It is the equivalent of putting a blindfold on everyone in Grand Central.

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