Bacteria as multicellular organisms

de James Alan Shapiro, Martin Dworkin

Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms is the first book dedicated to the multicellular behavior of microbes. This work goes beyond the traditional view of bacteria as single, autonomous cells and instead approaches bacteria as sentient, interactive organisms capable of significant collective activity. The cooperative and coordinated behaviors observed in a diverse range of bacteria in the past decade has been quite astonishing. In fact, bacteria possess an unexpectedly broad repertoire of chemical and physical mechanisms for signalling each other and organizing themselves into multicellular aggregates with novel properties. Some of the phenomena discussed in this book include communication, complexity, self-organization and pattern formation within bacterial populations.