There are many different ways of communication out there, and even the tiniest of organisms - aka microbes - are capable of doing so!

Microbes communicate with each other via chemical signals, a process called quorum sensing. It’s so cool to imagine that microbes live in their own little societies where they sense each other’s presence other in a space, can “talk” to each other and back each other up when needed (true story! Check out the comic strip!).

Whilst it was not directly something I was working on (sadly), I did come across quorum sensing a few times during my uni days and a couple of nice projects came from it.

Here is a comic strip I created to explain quorum sensing to my sister in law who is 10 years younger than me.

I also gave a third-year lecture on quorum sensing. This one is a bit more technical and assumes a bit of bio knowledge but it has some cool examples in it of different bacteria that use quorum sensing in different ways!

Here is a link to the actual slides I created, and here’s a link to my lecture notes.