Engineered bacterial communities can use chemical communication to coordinate a metabolic division of labour that no single strain performs as effectively alone.
Researchers assembled two three-strain communities to degrade mixtures of herbicides in soil. Different organisms handled complementary stages of the work, while quorum-sensing molecules regulated their collective metabolism: acyl-homoserine lactones dominated coordination in one community and autoinducer-2 in the other. Maize pot experiments also showed interactions between the introduced communities and indigenous soil microbes, extending the coordinated behaviour beyond the original engineered group.
