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  • Review Article
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Progress in and promise of bacterial quorum sensing research

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 01 March 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

This Review highlights how we can build upon the relatively new and rapidly developing field of research into bacterial quorum sensing (QS). We now have a depth of knowledge about how bacteria use QS signals to communicate with each other and to coordinate their activities. In recent years there have been extraordinary advances in our understanding of the genetics, genomics, biochemistry, and signal diversity of QS. We are beginning to understand the connections between QS and bacterial sociality. This foundation places us at the beginning of a new era in which researchers will be able to work towards new medicines to treat devastating infectious diseases, and use bacteria to understand the biology of sociality.

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Figure 1: Canonical QS and the chemical diversity of signals.
Figure 2: Social cheating in QS populations.
Figure 3: Factors that affect QS in natural environments.

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Change history

  • 28 February 2018

    Please see accompanying Corrigendum (http://doi.org/10.1038/nature25977). In Fig. 1b, the carboxyl group of compound number 6 has been added, and the chemical name in the Fig. 1b legend has changed from ‘methyl dodecenoic acid’ to ‘11-methyl-cis-dodecenoic acid’. See Supplementary Information to the Corrigendum for the original Fig. 1.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Levin and S. Brown for advice and T. Miyashiro for sharing images of squid light organs. We acknowledge support for of our research programs from US Public Health Service (USPHS) Grants GM59026 and P30DK089507 (to E.P.G.), R01GM116547 and NIH R01DE023193 (to M.W.), the Genomic Science Program, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, as part of the Plant Microbe Interfaces Scientific Focus Area (http://pmi.ornl.gov). Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 (to E.P.G.), and an Innovative Team Program Grant of Guangdong Province, China 2013S034 (to E.P.G.).

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M.W., S.P.D. and E.P.G. contributed equally to development, writing and revising this Review.

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Correspondence to E. Peter Greenberg.

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Reviewer Information Nature thanks N. Fierer, M. McFall-Ngai and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Whiteley, M., Diggle, S. & Greenberg, E. Progress in and promise of bacterial quorum sensing research. Nature 551, 313–320 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24624

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