Do Bacteria Exhibit Complex Social Behaviors and Multicellularity?

[iansmith]

Many species of bacteria live in a social, coordinated fashion, and they'll even die to keep it that way | By Leslie Pray


"The general character and structure of the rod-like individuals, together with their vegetative multiplication by fission, renders their schizomycetous nature as individuals a matter hardly to be doubted: but, on the other hand, the question may fairly be asked whether the remarkable phenomena may not indicate a possible relationship in other directions."

--Roland Thaxter, 1892

While walking through the New England woods one day in the late 19th century, Harvard microbiologist Roland Thaxter came across a bright orange, fungi-like growth unlike any organism he had ever seen. He took some of the mysterious organic matter back to his laboratory. Over the next two years, Thaxter collected and cultivated several more samples of this peculiar new organism, which he named Myxobacteriaceae. Characterized by an unusually complex life history for a bacterium, involving the formation of an elaborate, macroscopic fruiting body, Thaxter considered his find an "altogether so unique" exception to the unicellular rule.1

Myxobacteria, as they are commonly known, may not be so unusual after all. "The kind of behavior that myxobacteria exemplify is widely present, perhaps even universally present, among bacteria," says Martin Dworkin, a bacteriologist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. James Shapiro of the University of Chicago concurs: "Even very standard bacteria, like Escherichia coli, do things in a multicellular, coordinated fashion."

http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2003/dec/feature_031201.html

 

[wasteofo2]

Far out man...