Sometimes I love working across the street from the National Science Foundation. While walking through their lobby to stay cool on the way back from lunch I stumbled across a fascinating poster. The short version is that a) bacteria "communicate" with each other via signaling molecules (called quorum sensing), b) if they can't communicate they stay quiescent rather than become virulent (able to cause disease), and c) compounds that disrupt this communication are being developed with applications in both medicine and agriculture (the pic above from Flickr user CIMMYT shows bacterial lesions on a wheat leaf).
Read all about it here!
http://blog.nature.org/science/2013/07/16/disrupting-bacterial-communication-a-new-idea-for-sustainable-agriculture/
