life inspired

"bacteria, seemingly the most basic and solitary of life forms, are, in fact, communicating with each other. They are counting themselves, their cousin species, and the unrelated 'others' in their vicinity and changing their behavior as a group in response to the results of this census. Researchers who study this behavior, known as quorum sensing, believe this ability is the origin of multicellularity and communal behavior. It may also yield important practical benefits, such as new approaches for combating drug-resistant bacterial infections in humans." Full article @ PNAS

Labels: bacteria, collective behavior, quorum sensing

"The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa uses a cell-cell communication system termed “quorum sensing” to control production of public goods, extracellular products that can be used by any community member. Not all individuals respond to quorum-sensing signals and synthesize public goods. Such social cheaters enjoy the benefits of the products secreted by cooperators. There are some P. aeruginosa cellular enzymes controlled by quorum sensing, and we show that quorum sensing–controlled expression of such private goods can put a metabolic constraint on social cheating and prevent a tragedy of the commons." Full report @ Science

Labels: bacteria, collective intelligence, cooperation, quorum sensing, tragedy of commons

"a novel nature-inspired heuristic optimization algorithm: bacterial foraging algorithm with varying population (BFAVP), based on a more bacterially-realistic model of bacterial foraging patterns, which incorporates a varying population framework and the underlying mechanisms of bacterial chemotaxis, metabolism, proliferation, elimination and quorum sensing. In order to evaluate its merits, BFAVP has been tested on several benchmark functions and the results show that it performs better than other popularly used EAs, in terms of both accuracy and convergency." Full paper @ Biosystems.

Labels: bacteria, foraging, quorum sensing