Pönisch, W;
Eckenrode, KB;
Alzurqa, K;
Nasrollahi, H;
Weber, C;
Zaburdaev, V;
Biais, N;
(2018)
Pili mediated intercellular forces shape heterogeneous bacterial microcolonies prior to multicellular differentiation.
Scientific Reports
, 8
, Article 16567. 10.1038/s41598-018-34754-4.
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Abstract
Microcolonies are aggregates of a few dozen to a few thousand cells exhibited by many bacteria. The formation of microcolonies is a crucial step towards the formation of more mature bacterial communities known as biofilms, but also marks a significant change in bacterial physiology. Within a microcolony, bacteria forgo a single cell lifestyle for a communal lifestyle hallmarked by high cell density and physical interactions between cells potentially altering their behaviour. It is thus crucial to understand how initially identical single cells start to behave differently while assembling in these tight communities. Here we show that cells in the microcolonies formed by the human pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae (Ng) present differential motility behaviors within an hour upon colony formation. Observation of merging microcolonies and tracking of single cells within microcolonies reveal a heterogeneous motility behavior: cells close to the surface of the microcolony exhibit a much higher motility compared to cells towards the center. Numerical simulations of a biophysical model for the microcolonies at the single cell level suggest that the emergence of differential behavior within a multicellular microcolony of otherwise identical cells is of mechanical origin. It could suggest a route toward further bacterial differentiation and ultimately mature biofilms.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Pili mediated intercellular forces shape heterogeneous bacterial microcolonies prior to multicellular differentiation |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41598-018-34754-4 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-34754-4 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062568 |
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