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Chemical biology

How to sweet-talk bacteria

Nature Chemistry volume 1, pages 342–343 (2009)Cite this article

Small sugar molecules produced by an autocatalytic reaction cycle confined inside vesicle-based 'artificial cells' can trigger a response in living bacterial cells.

Recognizing that a living cell is an assembly of cooperating chemical sub-units, which together make up an organism with the required functions for life, raises a number of interesting questions. Among these are: how many components would it take to construct an ensemble that could be considered alive? And, related to this: how can we recognize and define when an artificial system is alive1,2,3? Living systems exhibit many characteristics that distinguish them from inorganic or non-living matter. Life is a complex phenomenon requiring not only individual self-replicating and self-sustaining systems, but also a mechanism that allows organization of information within these systems, which brings about characteristic evolutionary and metabolic dynamics1.

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Figure 1: A schematic representation of protocell-to-cell communication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Geoffrey J. T. Cooper and Leroy Cronin are part of WestCHEM, The University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. L.Cronin@chem.gla.ac.uk,

    Geoffrey J. T. Cooper & Leroy Cronin

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  1. Geoffrey J. T. Cooper
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  2. Leroy Cronin
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Cooper, G., Cronin, L. How to sweet-talk bacteria. Nature Chem 1, 342–343 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.306

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