Microbes as Communication & Decision-Making Networked Communities

Despite the simplicity of an individual cell, microbial communities exhibit complex behavior and play significant roles in many biological phenomena. Understanding the communication within and between bacterial species can illuminate the how, as well as the why of numerous interactions that enable their collective behavior. In this position paper, we first discuss bacterial molecular communication in multihop settings. We address this concept in the context of local and global quorum sensing (QS) within a colony and then consider induced QS at a distance between different, spatially separated communities. We then investigate how the information is shared between cells when forming a quorum, particularly the intertwined relationship between cells' observations, actions, and the state of their surrounding environment. Lastly, we extend to multi-species systems where all species coexist and interact, leveraging concepts from multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communications. Community robustness and resiliency is also explored.