We've all been sick; we're all afraid of infection. I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it's important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.
Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass.
We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms.
Microbes are doing things we didn't even know they could do 10 years ago.
My team and I have discovered, over decades of study, that mushroom mycelium is a rich resource of new antimicrobial compounds, which work in concert, helping protecting the mushrooms - and us - from microbial pathogens.
Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning.
From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!
All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.
