INTERCELLULAR INTERACTIONS MEDIATED BY CHEMICAL FACTORS

For a long time the ability of individual bacterial cells for autonomous proliferation in culture hide the rele-vance of intercellular communications for many life processes in bacterial populations. Now the novel idea that a bacterial population is a community of interacting cells with possible differentiation in this supracellular organism succeeds the old view on bacterial culture as a homogeneous soup in which individual cells live and proliferate independently of each other [1]. So, bacterial populations can be brought into comparison with tissues of higher organisms by their organization. It is well known that in tissues cells interact both physically to form tissue structure and via signaling molecules, such as the well-known communication molecules (cytokines) diffusing in the intercellular space. Now a sufficient body of experi-mental data suggests that both mechanisms are active in developing bacterial populations as well. The goal of our review is to define circumstances and processes in which intercellular interactions occur and to summarize the data on mechanisms of these interactions