Think like a bacterium

This EURESCO conference (June 7–12, 2002) was set in the lovely Alsatian village of Obernai, France, and was attended by 109 participants spanning junior to senior research careers, and representing both academic and industrial institutions. Organizers Barry Holland (Paris, France) and Charles Dorman (Dublin, Ireland) led participants on an excursion to Riquewihr, a scenic village on the Wine Road, pictured here.![][1] We must, albeit reluctantly, dismiss the naive but comforting myth of the bacterial cell as a simple loner: a self‐contained bag of uncompartmentalized enzymes, so exquisitely uncomplicated as to be understood outright and considered passe in this new millennium—a biological beaker for examining the more complicated eukaryotic versions of life. The recent EURESCO Conference on Bacterial Neural Networks heralded broadly the inescapable truth that bacteria cooperate in both uniform and mixed societies, sabotage the relatively mammoth creatures that they colonize, modify their own living spaces, and anticipate predictable changes in their surroundings. They achieve these feats with a clear sense of time and place, both within and outside their small but well‐organized bodies, and send and receive messages across comparatively vast space.Major themes of the meeting were the interconnected phenomena of signalling, behaviour and development, with just enough emphasis on technological advancements to presage how much more bacterial complexity is yet to be discovered as the tools improve. Overall, the conference was characterized by rigorous science that was professionally delivered by an overwhelmingly European cast of speakers and other participants (plus a few privileged interlopers such as myself). A small sampling of the diverse topics that were covered during a stimulating four‐day meeting is featured here, emphasizing those presentations that best highlight aspects of the neural network theme.### Sniffing out the way to goAt the heart of signal transduction mechanisms in bacteria is the two‐component paradigm, in which a histidine protein kinase and … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif