title: Understanding the Collective Nose of Bacteria.
abstract: Bacteria use a rich chemical vocabulary to "smell out" environmental conditions and communicate with each other about what is going on. This helps them optimize their virulence and attack differently, depending on whether they are, for example, in the lungs or the gut. In this issue of Cell Chemical Biology, Welsh and Blackwell (2016) start to unravel this complexity using chemical probes and offer insights into how we might start targeting these processes in a new way.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry and The National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva 84105, Israel. Electronic address: meijler@bgu.ac.il.
authors.forename: Michael M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Meijler
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria; D001421:Bacteria, Anaerobic; D032882:Comprehension; D062609:Electronic Nose; D006090:Gram-Negative Bacteria; D009666:Nose; D009668:Nose Diseases; D009812:Odorants; D012903:Smell; D014774:Virulence