Cool Video: Watching Bacteria Turn Virulent

Your browser does not support iframes. Researchers created an apparatus to study quorum sensing, a communication system that allows some bacteria to cause dangerous infections. Their findings suggest that blocking bacterial communication might lead to a new way to combat such infections. Credit: Minyoung Kevin Kim and Bonnie Bassler, Princeton University. If you’ve ever felt a slimy coating on your teeth, scrubbed grime from around a sink drain or noticed something growing between the tiles of a shower, you’ve encountered a biofilm. Made up of communities of bacteria and other microorganisms, biofilms thrive where they can remain moist and relatively undisturbed. As they enlarge, biofilms can block narrow passages like medical stents, airways, pipes or intestines. As a biofilm matures, bacteria within it begin using a chemical communication system known as quorum sensing. This system allows bacterial cells to “sense” their growing population, transmit information throughout the community, and produce virulence factors that transform the relatively harmless individual cells into a coordinated, disease-causing collective. Quorum sensing is associated with a long list of diseases as diverse as childhood ear infections, pneumonia, food poisoning and skin infections (including the potentially deadly methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA). In developing countries, add to the list cholera and typhoid. To study how bacteria form biofilms and become virulent us...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Cell Biology Chemistry and Biochemistry Source Type: blogs