Transition to quorum sensing in an Agrobacterium population: A stochastic model.

ABSTRACT: Understanding of the intracellular molecular machinery that is responsible for the complex collective behavior of multicellular populations is an exigent problem of modern biology. Quorum sensing, which allows bacteria to activate genetic programs cooperatively, provides an instructive and tractable example illuminating the causal relationships between the molecular organization of gene networks and the complex phenotypes they control. In this work we--to our knowledge for the first time--present a detailed model of the population-wide transition to quorum sensing using the example of Agrobacterium tumefaciens. We construct a model describing the Ti plasmid quorum-sensing gene network and demonstrate that it behaves as an "on-off" gene expression switch that is robust to molecular noise an

SUBMITTER: Goryachev AB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1214540 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature