The Social Life of Bacteria: Multicellularity, Signalling Mechanisms and Functional Interactions

Dear Colleagues,

The past two decades have changed our view of bacteria as simple unicellular organisms with basic abilities: moving towards nutrients or from stress factors, multiplying when resources abound and entering a quiescent state when they are depleted. We now know that bacteria can establish complex “social” interactions, from single and multispecies biofilm formation to coordinated population responses and interkingdom communication through sophisticated cell-to-cell signalling systems referred to as “quorum sensing”. Investigating the basis of these processes is key to understanding bacterial adaptation to diverse environments, their interactions with eukaryotic hosts, metabolic specialization in microbiomes, or the benefits associated with costly co-operative behaviours. This knowledge is essential to combat chronic infections, but also to develop efficient biotechnological applications based on microbial consortia, from bioreactors to inoculants for agricultural purposes. 

This Special Issue aims to put forward recent advances, new hypotheses, and future research paths on the mechanisms that determine the social life of bacteria: genetic and environmental factors that modulate the establishment of multicellular communities, the signalling pathways involved, their influence on inter- and intraspecific relationships, and the functional interactions between microbes sharing a niche.

Dr. Manuel Espinosa Urgel
Prof. Dr. Inmaculada Llamas Company
Guest Editors

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• biofilms
• quorum sensing
• signalling
• microbial interactions
• interkingdom communication
• bacterial social behaviours