ArticleeLife2017
Ecological feedback in quorum-sensing microbial populations can induce heterogeneous production of autoinducers.
Article in eLife, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Decoding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of bacterial virulence gene expression using single-cell approaches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- The art of modeling gene regulatory circuits.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Navigating Environmental Transitions: the Role of Phenotypic Variation in Bacterial Responses.mBio · 2022Review
- Self-organization of plasticity and specialization in a primitively social insect.Cell systems · 2022Article
- Cheater suppression and stochastic clearance through quorum sensing.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Diversity of bet-hedging strategies in microbial communities-Recent cases and insights.WIREs mechanisms of disease · 2022Review
- Phenotypic-dependent variability and the emergence of tolerance in bacterial populations.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Peptide signaling without feedback in signal production operates as a true quorum sensing communication system in Bacillus subtilis.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Pattern-induced local symmetry breaking in active-matter systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Multimodal Role of Amino Acids in Microbial Control and Drug Development.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- New insight into bacterial social communication in natural host: Evidence for interplay of heterogeneous and unison quorum response.PLoS genetics · 2019Article
- Burst statistics in an early biofilm quorum sensing model: the role of spatial colony-growth heterogeneity.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Bacterial quorum sensing in complex and dynamically changing environments.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2019Review
- Interactions mediated by a public good transiently increase cooperativity in growing Pseudomonas putida metapopulations.Scientific reports · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Autoinducers are small signaling molecules that mediate intercellular communication in microbial populations and trigger coordinated gene expression via 'quorum sensing'. Elucidating the mechanisms that control autoinducer production is, thus, pertinent to understanding collective microbial behavior, such as virulence and bioluminescence. Recent experiments have shown a heterogeneous promoter activity of autoinducer synthase genes, suggesting that some of the isogenic cells in a population might produce autoinducers, whereas others might not. However, the mechanism underlying this phenotypic heterogeneity in quorum-sensing microbial populations has remained elusive. In our theoretical model, cells synthesize and secrete autoinducers into the environment, up-regulate their production in this self-shaped environment, and non-producers replicate faster than producers. We show that the coupling between ecological and population dynamics through quorum sensing can induce phenotypic heterogeneity in microbial populations, suggesting an alternative mechanism to stochastic gene expression in bistable gene regulatory circuits.
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