Plants may trick bacteria into attacking before the microbial population reaches a critical size, allowing the plants to successfully defend the weak invasion.
Increasing the abundance of a chemical some microbes use to communicate with one another can help reinstate beneficial bacterial populations in the guts of antibiotic-treated mice.
Harvard biochemist J. Woodland Hastings, who first theorized about quorum sensing in the late 1960s, succumbed to pulmonary fibrosis last week at age 87.