Bacterial intelligence: imitation games, time-sharing, and long-range quantum coherence

Abstract

Bacteria are far more intelligent than we can think of. They adopt different survival strategies to make their life comfortable. Researches on bacterial communication to date suggest that bacteria can communicate with each other using chemical signaling molecules as well as using ion channel mediated electrical signaling. Though in past few decades the scopes of chemical signaling have been investigated extensively, those of electrical signaling have received less attention. In this article, we present a novel perspective on time-sharing behavior, which maintains the biofilm growth under reduced nutrient supply between two distant biofilms through electrical signaling based on the experimental evidence reported by Liu et al., in 2017. In addition, following the recent work by Humphries et al. Cell 168(1):200–209, in 2017, we highlight the consequences of long range electrical signaling within biofilm communities through spatially propagating waves of potassium. Furthermore, we address the possibility of two-way cellular communication between artificial and natural cells through chemical signaling being inspired by recent experimental observation (Lentini et al. 2017) where the efficiency of artificial cells in imitating the natural cells is estimated through cellular Turing test. These three spectacular observations lead us to envisage and devise new classical and quantum views of these complex biochemical networks that have never been realized previously.