Living cells communicate: electrons (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 01, 2013, 20:31 (4225 days ago) @ David Turell

How cells communicate with electrons:-"Another important phenomenon observed in multicellular organisms is intercellular communication. Many activities carried out within biofilms may be mediated by a form of cell-to-cell communication called quorum sensing. In quorum sensing, cells continually determine the density of their own population—"self" cells—by sensing the diffusion of chemical signaling molecules released by all "self" cells in the community. A variety of processes can only be performed in the presence of the requisite number of "self" cells, including bacterial light production, toxin secretion by pathogens, and the formation of biofilms.-Within the span of a few years, observations of microbial electron transport jumped from nanometer- to centimeter-length scales.
 
Cell-to-cell electron transfer could additionally serve a similar function to quorum sensing: allowing cells to communicate with each other. For example, in both Shewanella biofilms and the Desulfobulbaceae cable system, the flow of electrons occurs in one direction: toward the terminal electron acceptor. This directionality allows cells downstream in the redox gradient to be directly "informed" of the oxidation activity of their respiration partners upstream in the donor-rich regions. In this way, each cell along the electron transport pipeline can tune its local gene expression in response to events occurring far away. Cells are communicating their metabolic state across the network."-http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35299/title/Live-Wires/