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Apparently, when you are luminous, the whole world gets luminous with you. Or maybe, if you have a brain the size of a bacteria, you think it might.
The initial description of Vibrio fischeri quorum sensing was paralleled by a similar description in the related luminescent marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi103. Before we had any mechanistic understanding of acyl-homoserine lactone (acyl-HSL) signalling, it was shown that many other marine bacteria made something that signalled V. harveyi to induce its luminescence genes104. It seemed that V. harveyi might measure the total bacterial load in its local environment rather than simply its own population size104.
http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v3/n9/box/nrm907_BX4.html
The initial description of Vibrio fischeri quorum sensing was paralleled by a similar description in the related luminescent marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi103. Before we had any mechanistic understanding of acyl-homoserine lactone (acyl-HSL) signalling, it was shown that many other marine bacteria made something that signalled V. harveyi to induce its luminescence genes104. It seemed that V. harveyi might measure the total bacterial load in its local environment rather than simply its own population size104.
http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v3/n9/box/nrm907_BX4.html