Abstract. With the standard fibre being a coset manifold, the transformation of a connection form in a fibre bundle under the action of the isometry group includes a dependence on the fibre coordinate. Elimination of the fibre coordinate from the transformation rule implies that the standard fibre is a Lie group and that the bundle is a principal bundle.The dependence on the fibre coordinate is considered in the examples of the SO(4) action on an S 3 bundle and the SO(8) action on an S 7 bundle. The nonlinear SU(4) action on an S 7 bundle is applied to the dimensional reduction of 11-dimensional supergravity and ten-dimensional superstring theory to four dimensions. A principle, consistent with higherdimensional superstring theory, is suggested to explain the types of gauge interactions that arise in the standard model based on the geometry of the internal symmetry spaces. It is shown why a Lie group structure is required for vector bosons in pure gauge theories and that the application of division algebras to force unification must begin with the fermions comprising the elementary particle multiplets of the standard model. Gauge transformations in quantum principal bundles, using generalizations of left and right multiplication and connection forms, are shown to satisfy conditions similar to those in classical gauge theories.