This article describes recent quorum sensing research in bacteria and its connection with social networks. Quorum sensing is the ability of bacteria groups to communicate and coordinate behavior through signaling molecules and pathways. This phenomenon is what enables bacteria colonies to accumulate enough bacteria to act, developing infections, illnesses, and biofilms. Studying quorum sensing has led many researches into drug development with the basic principle that disrupting network communication will also disrupt bacteria function. The early discoveries regarding this type of research by Professor Bonnie Bassler from Princeton is compared to the social networking efforts that preceded such companies like MySpace and Facebook.
This article only briefly introduced the area of research as a developing field full of questions, but it would be interesting to see how principles of social networks may have powerful applications in drug development and medicine. Since this area is studying bacteria networks and not human networks, there would be a whole new set of rules for nodes and edges to follow that would have to take into account biological and biochemical mechanisms as well as basic chemical properties of human physiology. The application of social networks provides a novel but powerful perspective through which existing problems can be seen from a new angle. It seems very conceivable that fundamental principles of social networks among humans can be used as a foundation to study networks in all sorts of other applications in the future.
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