Role of Quorum Sensing in the Survival of Rhizospheric Microbes

Abstract

Quorum sensing (QS) signaling is a cell-to-cell communication or coordination at microbial population level. However, the ecological role of QS in complex or multi-species communities, principally in the milieu of community assemblage, has neither been experimentally discovered nor theoretically revealed. QS comprises the production of secreted signals (diffusible), which can diverge across diverse types of microbes. Over the past decades, there has been a significant accretion of data of the molecular mechanisms, gene regulons, signal structures, and behavioral responses related with QS systems gained. More recent studies have focused on understanding quorum sensing in the context of bacterial sociality. Studies of the role of quorum sensing in cooperative and competitive microbial interactions have discovered, how QS coordinates interactions both within and between the species. Such studies of quorum sensing as a social behavior have relied on the development of �synthetic ecological� models that use nonclonal bacterial populations. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to understand how microbes might interact with one another in the plant root�associated soils using QS system. � The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021.