Quorum sensing diagram

Chatter between bacterial cells may stall healing of skin wounds, and sabotaging that chitchat could offer another way to battle infection, new research suggests.

Making Pseudomonas aeruginosa deaf to the molecular signals that the bacteria use to talk to each other would offer a kind of antibiotic therapy that doesn’t kill bacterial cells but rather strikes at their ability to attack human cells en masse, Jasper Jacobsen of the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen said May 24 at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Science News: Bacterial chitchat proves distracting for wound healing

See also:

Hacking Your Body’s Bacteria for Better Health

Bacteria vs. Humans: Score One for Us

Talking to bacteria