ReviewNature reviews. Microbiology2013
Competition sensing: the social side of bacterial stress responses.
Review in Nature reviews. Microbiology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 259 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
259 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Harnessing plant-microbe interactions: strategies for enhancing resilience and nutrient acquisition for sustainable agriculture.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Pooled it
- From predicted bacteriocins to ecological function.Current research in microbial sciences · 2026Review
- Quantifying antibiotic susceptibility and inoculum effects using transient dynamics of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Microbiome ecology and antibiotic treatment failure: resistance spread, microbial competition and community engineering.Microbial genomics · 2026Review
- Implications of proteome allocation constraints for understanding interbacterial antagonism.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Microbiome-Immune Interactions as Determinants of Checkpoint Inhibitor Efficacy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Synthetic microbial communities for studying the fate and ecological role of specialized metabolites.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- ABPs: diffusible antibacterial toxins secreted by and active against diverse gram-positive bacteria.Infection and immunity · 2026Review
- Beyond Resistance Genes:Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- From contamination to valorisation: a case study assessing culture contamination effect on the biofuel potential and nanomechanical properties of Parachlorella kessleri.Biotechnology for biofuels and bioproducts · 2026Article
- Quartet: Disentangling positive and negative components of microbial interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Lactic acid bacteria and their bacteriocins: promising food safety tools for controlling the foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes.World journal of microbiology & biotechnology · 2026Review
- Isolation, genomic characterization, and biofilm eradication activity of vB_PaP_DMTU_1, a novel lytic bacteriophage against Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Folia microbiologica · 2026Article
- Neisseria subflava Type 6 Secretion System competition with bacterial and fungal species.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2026Article
- Review
- Plant-Associated Microbiomes: Crosstalk and Engineering to Improve Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE) in Crops of Global Importance.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Growth-dependent sensory bet-hedging enhances collective navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A New Modification of the Method for Assessing the Intraspecific Antagonistic Activity of Escherichia coli.Bulletin of experimental biology and medicine · 2026Article
- The sleeping bacterium: shedding light on the resuscitation mechanism.European biophysics journal : EBJ · 2026Article
- Copper is an intestinal habitat filter affecting the gut microbiota interactions with Salmonella Typhimurium.Microbiome · 2026Article
199 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The field of ecology has long recognized two types of competition: exploitative competition, which occurs indirectly through resource consumption, and interference competition, whereby one individual directly harms another. Here, we argue that these two forms of competition have played a dominant role in the evolution of bacterial regulatory networks. In particular, we argue that several of the major bacterial stress responses detect ecological competition by sensing nutrient limitation (exploitative competition) or direct cell damage (interference competition). We call this competition sensing: a physiological response that detects harm caused by other cells and that evolved, at least in part, for that purpose. A key prediction of our hypothesis is that bacteria will counter-attack when they sense ecological competition but not when they sense abiotic stress. In support of this hypothesis, we show that bacteriocins and antibiotics are frequently upregulated by stress responses to nutrient limitation and cell damage but very rarely upregulated by stress responses to heat or osmotic stress, which typically are not competition related. We argue that stress responses, in combination with the various mechanisms that sense secretions, enable bacteria to infer the presence of ecological competition and navigate the 'microbe-kill-microbe' world in which they live.
Indexed as
Identifiers
23456045What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.