Bacterial bioconvection confers context-dependent growth benefits and is robust under varying metabolic and genetic conditions.

ABSTRACT: Microbes often respond to environmental cues by adopting collective behaviors-like biofilms or swarming-that benefit the population. During "bioconvection," microbes gather in dense groups and plume downward through fluid environments, driving flow and mixing on the scale of millions of cells. Though bioconvection was observed a century ago, the effects of differing physical and chemical inputs and its potential selective advantages for different species of microbes remain largely unexplored. In Bacillus subtilis, vertical oxygen gradients that originate from air-liquid interfaces create cell-density inversions that drive bioconvection. Here, we develop Escherichia coli as a complementary model for the study of bioconvection. In the context of a still fluid, we found that mot

SUBMITTER: Shoup D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10601612 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature