Cephalove recently had a couple of lovely posts about that most famous of squid symbioses: the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes and the bioluminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri. It's become a model system for all kinds of questions about bacteria-host relationships, including pathogenic ones (read: bacterial disease). And it's an excuse to add adorable photos to otherwise not-very-photogenic stories about microbes! See:
The latest news to come out of all this research into V. fischeri is a new medical approach to fighting bacterial diseases. (And it's about time we got a new approach, because the age of antibiotics may well be drawing to a close.)
Quorum sensing has attracted considerable interest as a way to keep bacteria from "behaving badly," Blackwell says. Because a drug that blocks the quorum signal would not kill bacteria but simply prevent them from releasing toxins and causing disease, "we anticipate that the bacteria are not going to develop resistance as quickly, if at all."
Old NID
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