Cell and Developmental Biology Commons^™

Talking To Themselves: Autoregulation And Quorum Sensing In Fungi, Deborah A. Hogan

Dartmouth Scholarship

Extracellular autoinducing compounds in the supernatants of microbial cultures were first recognized for their roles in the induction of genetic competence in gram-positive bacteria and in the regulation of light production in marine vibrios. In 1994, this form of population-level regulation in microbes was dubbed “quorum sensing” since it enabled bacterial cells to chemically measure the density of the surrounding population. Subsequently, many examples of cell density-dependent regulation by extracellular factors have been found in diverse microorganisms. The widespread incidence of diverse quorum-sensing systems strongly suggests that regulation in accordance with cell density is important for the success of microbes …