Abstract
Nanotubes: Shaking Hands, Talking, or Sharing?
Highlights
Bacteria have developed a remarkable variety of intra-species contact-dependent signaling mechanisms (Hayes et al, 2010)
Most conjugative plasmid transfer is restricted to specific species, but a subset of promiscuous plasmids can transfer between many different species and have a broad-host-range specificity (Thomas and Nielsen, 2005)
In contrast to the systems described above, there is no specificity in terms of the translocated substrate, the direction of transfer, or the species it is delivered to (Dubey and Ben-Yehuda, 2011). In their potentially ground-breaking paper, Dubey and Ben-Yehuda (2011) show that Bacillus subtilis cells grown on solid medium can transfer multiple cytoplasmic contents to neighboring cells
Summary
Bacteria have developed a remarkable variety of intra-species contact-dependent signaling mechanisms (Hayes et al, 2010). These three mechanisms are all characterized by the specific transfer of a limited number of signals in response to highly specific environmental cues between cells of the same species. In the February 18th issue of Cell, Sigal BenYehuda’s group describes a new form of inter-bacterial communication: the transfer of cytoplasmic constituents through novel structures termed nanotubes.
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