ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Metabolic basis of brain-like electrical signalling in bacterial communities.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 100 citations in OpenAlex.
- Tactical use of irrigants in open orthopaedic procedures: 'what to use & when'.EFORT open reviews · 2026Review
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part Two.Biological theory · 2026Article
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- An agent-based model of metabolic signaling oscillations in Bacillus subtilis biofilms.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- All Organisms Can Be Anesthetized, but There's No Point?BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Article
- The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Photocontrol of bacterial membrane potential regulates antibiotic persistence inEuropean physical journal plus · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Towards measurements of absolute membrane potential in Bacillus subtilis using fluorescence lifetime.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- Microbes, macrophages, and melanin: a unifying theory of disease as exemplified by cancer.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Bioelectrical State of Bacteria Is Linked to Growth Dynamics and Response to Neurotransmitters: Perspectives for the Investigation of the Microbiota-Brain Axis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- There's Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- Bioelectricity: From Endogenous Mechanisms to Opportunities in Synthetic Bioengineering.Bioelectricity · 2022Article
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- Ion Transporting Proteins and Cancer: Progress and Perspectives.Reviews of physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology · 2022Article
- Evolution of glutamatergic signaling and synapses.Neuropharmacology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Information processing in the mammalian brain relies on a careful regulation of the membrane potential dynamics of its constituent neurons, which propagates across the neuronal tissue via electrical signalling. We recently reported the existence of electrical signalling in a much simpler organism, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis. In dense bacterial communities known as biofilms, nutrient-deprived B. subtilis cells in the interior of the colony use electrical communication to transmit stress signals to the periphery, which interfere with the growth of peripheral cells and reduce nutrient consumption, thereby relieving stress from the interior. Here, we explicitly address the interplay between metabolism and electrophysiology in bacterial biofilms, by introducing a spatially extended mathematical model that combines the metabolic and electrical components of the phenomenon in a discretized reaction-diffusion scheme. The model is experimentally validated by environmental and genetic perturbations, and confirms that metabolic stress is transmitted through the bacterial population via a potassium wave. Interestingly, this behaviour is reminiscent of cortical spreading depression in the brain, characterized by a wave of electrical activity mediated by potassium diffusion that has been linked to various neurological disorders, calling for future studies on the evolutionary link between the two phenomena. This article is part of the theme issue 'Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.