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Science

Wireless Messaging for Bacteria 27

Posted by timothy from the well-it-is-wireless dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to BBC's article, UK scientists discovered that bacteria have a capability of warning each other over air about new antidotes introduced and by doing so help to develop a resistance to antibiotics! Speaking of 802.11 standard amongst microbes! This is so twisted!"
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Wireless Messaging for Bacteria More

Wireless Messaging for Bacteria

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  • I recall one study that showed that Staph bactiria dont attack until the reach a certain size, to prevent a small number from triggering an immune response, but I dont remember the study indicated the communication was airborne. The goal was to block the communication to attack to prevent staph infections.
    • I saw another similiar case on a documentary one time with trees. While not cellular, it's certainly interesting. Apparently if an animal came along and started eating at the leaves or bark of the tree, it would release a chemical into the air. Surrounding trees would then start producing something to make them less appetizing to the hungry beasts.

      I don't remember the name of the tree and a quick Google search didn't turn up anything. Anyone familiar with it?

      I don't know if I'd classify these actions as communication, but it is neat to see the creative ways nature comes up with to preserve itself.
      • If you had only read the fucking article....

      • I heard a couple o' years ago that the africa Mopane tree released something as simple as methane/propane when its leaves where eaten. Other Mopane in the vicinity then produced more tannin, which made the leaves indigestable to the antelopes that eat them.

        And then the English go and drink an extract of the tannin-rich tea leaf!

  • Hmmm. Altho the article is not detailed enough to really tell whats going on, there are other possibilities besides communication, chemical or otherwise, between the bacteria. What they have is a SYSTEM consisting not only of bacteria, but also moist growth medium, antibiotics, air, and the plastic or glass petri dish. Let's say the plastic/glass is inert and isn't playing a role in the effect. Possible there is some interaction between just the air, moist growth medium and antibiotic and the EFFECT of this interaction is happy bacteria, which aren't participating in originating the effect. For example, putting in the 5 mm gap in the wall to connect the two chambers also allows water vapor transfer between the dosed and undosed media. If the bacteria colonies grow and absorb water, the media around them becomes dryer and the drug more concentrated and deadly. If there's a vapor pathway to fresh medium, maybe the dry drugged medium absorbs water thru the air from the undrugged fresh medium, diluting it. Since the bacteria are only growing on the surface, this is enough to keep them going. I'm not saying this is what IS happening, I'm saying that true science is about trying to consider ALL possibilities, even the ones that won't make the news, like water vapor transfer instead of bacterial chemical warning signals. Rule one in science is always consider some other (usually unglamorous) possibility.....
    • One problem with the vapour diffusion theory, is that bacteria tend to have a wide tolence for varying environomental conditions. If one side was drying out, then I would suspect that the effects on the agar gel (I'm guessing that's what they are using as a growth media) would be visable, if the mosture levels got low enough to kill the bacteria.
  • This could ripe for bugs.

  • Of course it's wireless! (Score:3, Funny)

    by drfrank ( 16371 ) on Sunday April 14, 2002 @08:17PM (#3340866)
    A more interesting story title would have been "Wired Messaging for Bacteria". As far as I know, no bacterial colony has been caught setting up and using a wired telecommunications network. (The pond-scum at Qwest [tsewq.com] have gotten close, but they're certainly not there yet.)
  • This situation isn't convincing enough for me to believe that bacteria are communication to eachother...

    1. For the airborne "messages" to be sent, I'm assuming that the E.coli cultures were in open air, and not in water. So each side of the divider was pretty much in the same system.

    2. If "pheremones" were able to cross through the gap, then the antibiotics should have been able to also.

    Now it is a simple problem of ratio...

    If you have an ammount of antibiotics x, and another number of E.coli y, then you will have the ratio of antibiotits to bacterium x/y. If x is a large number compared to y, then the E.coli have small chance of survival... more "poision" per cell. But if you were increase y, then the ammount of "poision" per cell decreases in the system, thus improving the chance for each individual cell to survive.

    Either they're disregarding this possibility, or there wasn't enough information given in the article.

    • Re:obvious? (Score:2, Informative)

      by cp99 ( 559733 )
      1. For the airborne "messages" to be sent, I'm assuming that the E.coli cultures were in open air, and not in water. So each side of the divider was pretty much in the same system.

      They were in a petri dish which had a dividing wall cutting it into two sections. There was a 5 mm gap between the dividing wall and the roof, so they weren't exactly in "open air"

      2. If "pheremones" were able to cross through the gap, then the antibiotics should have been able to also.

      To the best of my knowledge, antibiotics can't migrate through the air (there may be a few varities which can, but the vast majority can't), so they shouldn't migrate across the barrier.

      If you have an ammount of antibiotics x, and another number of E.coli y, then you will have the ratio of antibiotits to bacterium x/y. If x is a large number compared to y, then the E.coli have small chance of survival... more "poision" per cell. But if you were increase y, then the ammount of "poision" per cell decreases in the system, thus improving the chance for each individual cell to survive.

      This isn't exactly how the bacteria survive. Generally only a small amount of antibiotics is needed to kill a bacteria infection. However a tiny minority of bacteria (maybe one in a billion) will mutate (or already possess the mutation) so it is immune to the antibiotics. These bacteria will either repopulate the petri dish with their clones, or pass on the mutation to other non-clones (bacteria commonly swap genetic material) allowing them to survive. Therefore it isn't a simple x/y ratio.
      • If the antibiotics weren't airborne, then how could the bacteria on the "clean" side help out the bacteria that were being killed? They're saying that the bacteria on the non-effected side sent "survival" signs to tell the dieing bacteria to "turn on genes"... why would the non-effected bacteria have this "special knowledge" that the dieing bacteria didnt?
  • If they had anything why wouldn't they publish their results in Nature?

    "We've tried without success to isolate the chemical signal from the air by dissolving it. Next we'll try gas chromatography."

    They havn't even isolated it! Gah. Sending your results to New Scientist is about as professional as posting them on Slashdot.
  • ... write up an RCF to implement IP over this.

  • duh? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by skilef ( 525335 )
    The mechanism already known to do this is quorum-sensing. Researchers didn't know any airborne agents used in such a process.. They're talking about thriving populations; one of the main purposes of quorum sensing in the regulation of population growth. If cells are thriving, it means they 'know' due to quorum sensing there is enough food and room to duplicate.. Let's say those microbes in the dish with antibiotics gets a 'duplicate'-signal, the effect could be stronger than the presence of antibiotics. Microbes can reduce the stress induced by antibiotics actively. In the end, they'll die unless they're resistant. So if the 'multiply'-signal could induce multiplication instead of fighting the stress without a sufficient effect, the microbes in the antibiotic solution could just outrun the extinction effect by duplicating faster. Could be a new airborne 'divide'-signal. Resistance-signals are VERY unlikely!
  • Although the article describes it as a "warning" signal, as far as I can tell one batch of microbes receives no antibotic at all. It seems to provide only moral support: "Hey, we're here, you can go ahead and survive."

    It's not a completely ridiculous concept; bacteria do exhibit various forms of group behavior (e.g. biofilms) that these guys are seeking to work around because they're particularly tough to kill. And I'm willing to believe that these communications could be airborne as well as aqueous.

    But I'd much rather see this article in Nature than from the BBC. There are all kinds of controls they should have put on the experiment (what happens if there's no air gap at all? What if you remove the barrier?). There are a vast variety of sources of experimental error in a lab.
    • But I'd much rather see this article in Nature than from the BBC

      .... or Microbiology for that matter. Much as I'm tempted to go to the library to look up the hard copy of New Scientist, I have a suspicion that there won't be too much experimental detail there either. Yeah, I know that this is a frequent whine about science in the popular press - but it's still frustrating.

      • I've read the orginal article, and it the same as the BBC report. Aparently the results were given at a talk in a conference, and a New Scientist journalist found it interesting enough to give it a write up.
  • ... but as someone who now works in biotech, I suppose this sort of thing represents job security ...
  • that bacteria have a capability of warning each other over air about new antidotes introduced

    ...in Xenocide, anyone else remember the descolata virus?

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