Cell-cell contacts confine public goods diffusion inside Pseudomonas aeruginosa clonal microcolonies.

ABSTRACT: The maintenance of cooperation in populations where public goods are equally accessible to all but inflict a fitness cost on individual producers is a long-standing puzzle of evolutionary biology. An example of such a scenario is the secretion of siderophores by bacteria into their environment to fetch soluble iron. In a planktonic culture, these molecules diffuse rapidly, such that the same concentration is experienced by all bacteria. However, on solid substrates, bacteria form dense and packed colonies that may alter the diffusion dynamics through cell-cell contact interactions. In Pseudomonas aeruginosa microcolonies growing on solid substrate, we found that the concentration of pyoverdine, a secreted iron chelator, is heterogeneous, with a maximum at the center of the colony. We quant

SUBMITTER: Julou T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3732961 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature