Quorum Sensing: Complexity in the bacterial world

We discuss the mechanisms of bacterial Quorum Sensing, the biophysical phenomenon pointing out a social behavior in bacteria, highlighting thus the very complex structure of these systems. Actually, bacterial bioluminescence is an example of a quorum sensing mediated property. We show that the distribution of the activation times of the bioluminescent emission follows the universal behavior described by the Gumbel distribution of extreme value statistics. We provide further evidence on the system size scaling of bioluminescence, showing that the relation between cell density and total number of photons radiated by bacteria is highly non-linear.