ReviewApplied and environmental microbiology2015
Phenotypic Heterogeneity, a Phenomenon That May Explain Why Quorum Sensing Does Not Always Result in Truly Homogenous Cell Behavior.
Review in Applied and environmental microbiology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 106 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Psychrophilic Quorum Sensing Genes Enable Unimodal, Adjustable Protein Expression Across the EntireBiotech (Basel (Switzerland)) · 2026Article
- Microbial quorum sensing signals, symbiosis, secrets and sabotage.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Review
- Two Worlds, One Battle: How Bacteria and Malignancies Converge on Drug Resistance.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- The acquisition of additional control over quorum sensing regulation reduces the variability of final cell density in Burkholderia.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Quorum Sensing Coordinates Carbon and Nitrogen Metabolism to Optimize Public Goods Production in Pseudomonas fluorescens 2P24.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Photodynamic inactivation and its effects on the heterogeneity of bacterial resistance.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Unravelling the Roles of Bacterial Nanomachines Bistability in Pathogens' Life Cycle.Microorganisms · 2024Review
- Engineering plasmid copy number heterogeneity for dynamic microbial adaptation.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Phenotypic memory in quorum sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Diverse regulatory pathways modulate bet hedging of competence induction in epigenetically-differentiated phase variants of Streptococcus pneumoniae.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- Quorum sensing going wild.iScience · 2023Review
- Quorum sensing as a mechanism to harness the wisdom of the crowds.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The dynamic response of quorum sensing to density is robust to signal supplementation and individual signal synthase knockouts.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Article
- A clash of quorum sensing vs quorum sensing inhibitors: an overview and risk of resistance.Archives of microbiology · 2023Review
- Diverse mechanisms of bioproduction heterogeneity in fermentation and their control strategies.Journal of industrial microbiology & biotechnology · 2023Review
- The Phenomenon of Antibiotic Resistance in the Polar Regions: An Overview of the Global Problem.Infection and drug resistance · 2023Review
- Navigating Environmental Transitions: the Role of Phenotypic Variation in Bacterial Responses.mBio · 2022Review
- Article
- Epigenetic-Mediated Antimicrobial Resistance: Host versus Pathogen Epigenetic Alterations.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Phenotypic heterogeneity describes the occurrence of "nonconformist" cells within an isogenic population. The nonconformists show an expression profile partially different from that of the remainder of the population. Phenotypic heterogeneity affects many aspects of the different bacterial lifestyles, and it is assumed that it increases bacterial fitness and the chances for survival of the whole population or smaller subpopulations in unfavorable environments. Well-known examples for phenotypic heterogeneity have been associated with antibiotic resistance and frequently occurring persister cells. Other examples include heterogeneous behavior within biofilms, DNA uptake and bacterial competence, motility (i.e., the synthesis of additional flagella), onset of spore formation, lysis of phages within a small subpopulation, and others. Interestingly, phenotypic heterogeneity was recently also observed with respect to quorum-sensing (QS)-dependent processes, and the expression of autoinducer (AI) synthase genes and other QS-dependent genes was found to be highly heterogeneous at a single-cell level. This phenomenon was observed in several Gram-negative bacteria affiliated with the genera Vibrio, Dinoroseobacter, Pseudomonas, Sinorhizobium, and Mesorhizobium. A similar observation was made for the Gram-positive bacterium Listeria monocytogenes. Since AI molecules have historically been thought to be the keys to homogeneous behavior within isogenic populations, the observation of heterogeneous expression is quite intriguing and adds a new level of complexity to the QS-dependent regulatory networks. All together, the many examples of phenotypic heterogeneity imply that we may have to partially revise the concept of homogeneous and coordinated gene expression in isogenic bacterial populations.
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