A single intracellular protein governs the critical transition from an individual to a coordinated population response during quorum sensing: Origins of primordial language

Quorum sensing (QS) explains a type of bacterial cell-cell communication mediated by exocellular compounds that act as autoinducers (AIs). As such, QS can be considered the most primordial form of language. QS has profound implications for the control of many important traits (e.g. biofilm formation, secretion of virulence factors, etc.). Conceptually, the QS response can be split into its \"listening\" and \"speaking\" components, i.e. the power to sense AI levels vs. the ability to synthesize and release these molecules. By explaining the cell-density dependence of QS behavior as the consequence of the systems arrival to a threshold AI concentration, models of QS have traditionally assumed