Quorum sensing and social interactions during infection

Abstract

Individual microbial cells may interact in a variety of ways, including through quorum sensing (QS), coordinating production of nutrient-scavenging molecules, and forming multicellular biofilms. Understanding whether a behavior is social can help us understand how bacterial populations interact within infected hosts, explaining some kinds of clinical observations as well as how virulence evolves. Despite interest in this issue, experimental tests of whether bacterial behaviors such as QS are truly social are scarce. From both mechanistic and evolutionary standpoints, QS is a social behavior. Mutants that are defective in QS can be isolated from sites of infection, despite QS being important for virulence.