New Vocabulary for Bacterial Communication

Abstract Quorum sensing (QS) is widely accepted as a procedure that bacteria use to converse. However, prevailing thinking places acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) at the forefront of this communication pathway in Gram‐negative bacteria. With the advent of high‐throughput genomics and the subsequent influx of bacterial genomes, bioinformatics analysis has determined that the genes encoding AHL biosynthesis, originally discovered to be indispensable for QS (LuxI‐like proteins and homologues), are often absent in QS‐capable bacteria. Instead, the sensing protein (LuxR‐like proteins) is present with an apparent inability to produce any outgoing AHL signal. Recently, several signals for these Lux…