MEETING REVIEW “Neural Networks ” in Bacteria: Making Connections

Data from all aspects of bacteriology, from genomics through to single-protein localization, have been accumulating at an astonishing rate over the past few years. How then to make sense of all this information and how to try and assemble it into a rational, robust model that might go some way to explaining “a bacterium”? How does such a cell sense, re-spond, and adapt as it interacts with its local environment? These are the long-term goals of many bacteriologists, and 120 assembled in May 2004 in San Feliu in northern Spain to tackle aspects of this problem from a very wide range of perspectives. This was the fourth of the conferences funded by the European Union and now organized by the European Science Founda-tion under the title “Bacterial Neural Networks. ” The aim of this conference series is to bring together scientists investigat-ing different aspects of bacterial behavior and using very dif